Complications! Serendipity! Action resolution twists

An envelope gets tugged out of your hand by the wind. You kick your desk and slosh coffee everywhere. You bump into a friend in an unexpected place. A bird lands on your shoulder. The pen runs out of ink when you try to sign.

Because of how our own world works, we expect fictional worlds to be full of lots of little chance things which individually happen rarely. Pieces of serendipity. Unwanted side effects. Unexpected interruptions. Unforeseen complications.

Characters in the fictive world of a tabletop game should expect to encounter little surprises here and there. Not all the time; perhaps not as much as they do in the real world, because of the focus on exciting impactful play — but enough for verisimilitude.

Twisting outcomes ad hoc

TTRPGs often have rules for very consequential rare outcomes (critical hits, spell mishaps, fumbles, etc). But (especially in rules-light games) it is often down to the referee to come up with any smaller "twists": the complications and bits of serendipity we expect to happen not-too-infrequently when someone attempts to do something.

There are two problems with having the referee add twists to action outcomes on the spur of the moment.

1. The imagination is a resource. Thinking requires time and effort, a referee has a lot of mental overhead, and adding twists to action resolution begins with remembering to actually do it. Even an experienced and confident ref likes to have tools at their disposal to reduce mental effort.
2. If it's not a formal procedure, it can feel arbitrary. If the referee just tells a player "your sword hilt catches in the reins of the knight's horse as it gallops past and is ripped away, pinwheeling across the battlefield" it may feel unfair, even punishing. Why them? Why now? Why misfortune instead of fortune? This naturally leads to the ref only adding complications in low-risk environments, which is less interesting.

So here's an approach you can bolt on to any game to add more twists.

 

A procedure for twists

I was reading some older blog posts about (1) spark tables (Bastionland), (2) GM intrusions in Numenera (Alexandrian), and (3) the habit of rolling for complications (Necropraxis), and they got me thinking. We can put together some simple tools for adding twists.

The design goal is to create a procedure that is

• quick, simple, and useful to a referee,
• neither too game-specific nor too vague,
• open-ended and flexible. 

We just need a few dice tables and a basic rule for rolling on them. 

Here's the simple procedure I came up with:

1️⃣ The referee (or designer) should decide on the mechanical trigger for adding a twist to an action outcome. This will be system-dependent, e.g., "when the margin of success or failure is 10 or more", or "when a 01-03 or 98-00 is rolled on percentage dice", or "when rolling with (dis)advantage", or "when anyone spends a luck point".

2️⃣ Ideally it's something that players and referee alike can notice, so that it gets remembered, and eventually comes to be expected.

3️⃣ Now if this trigger applies during action resolution, the referee rolls 1d10 twice and consults the following dice tables, picking whichever of the two outcomes is more plausible for the context. Reroll if absolutely necessary.

(If there's no appropriate trigger for your system, you might roll 1d12 before each action adjudication and give a positive twist on a 12 or a negative twist on a 1. Or if you want lots of serendipity/misfortune and fewer dice rolls, just extend the following dice tables to 1d20 size and roll a pair of d20s for every action adjudication, one for a positive twist and one for a negative twist, ignoring results higher than 10.)

 

Dice table #1: Combat-specific twists

In a fight, one side's boon is the other's bane. The table entries refer to a "combatant" who should either be the character acting, or the opponent they are focusing on, as appropriate for the trigger. (This should work even for games without symmetrical combat mechanics, with a reasonable choice of trigger.)

1. Exposed. Combatant is drawn out of position, surrounded, or put on bad footing.
2. Toppled. Combatant is knocked down.
3. Lost grip. Combatant drops their weapon, gets it stuck in something, or loses their grip.
4. Disoriented. Combatant is blinded, dazed, scared, or demoralised by a combat event.
5. Jostled. Combatant is trampled, grabbed, or knocked aside.
6. Extra injury. Combatant suffers an additional incidental wound.
7. Ally harmed. Combatant accidentally causes harm to (or disrupts) one of their allies.
8. Armour broken. Combatant's shield or a piece of body armour breaks, is removed, or is rendered useless.
9. Weapon breaks. Combatant's weapon is made useless: a blade breaks, string snaps, gun jams, etc.
10. Impeded. Combatant is tangled or otherwise hampered by terrain or their own armour.

 

Next we'll look at random tables for general actions. We can't expect there to be a zero-sum symmetry like there is in combat, so we'll need separate misfortune and benefit tables. Choose the appropriate one for the trigger.

(Depending on the trigger, negative twists might still occur for successful actions and positive twists for failures. I think this is a good thing.)

Dice table #2: General action twists (misfortune)

1. Incidental damage. Whatever the character is working on or with (a rope, lock, computer, tool, weapon, etc) is damaged.
2. Extra time. The action takes longer than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task early when this becomes clear).
3. Costly. The action will take more resources than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task instead when this becomes clear).
4. Loud or unimpressive. A mistake or coincidence causes the action to get everyone's attention. This may be laughable, socially objectionable, distracting, or dangerous.
5. Minor injury. The character suffers some small harm in the course of attempting the action.
6. Crudely done. The action is performed clumsily or its effect is crude and sloppy, in a way likely to have later repercussions.
7. Unwanted side effect. Attempting the action also causes a problem, likely related to the method used and the circumstances.
8. Hidden step. Attempting the action reveals a new challenge which must be overcome before the action can actually be completed. *
9. One shot. Attempting the action reveals circumstances which mean the task can't be tried again following this attempt. *
10. Tougher than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something about the situation which makes the task harder than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Note the last three entries may necessitate changing the details of the world. This approach might not work for everyone.

Dice table #3: General action twists (benefit) 

1. Skill increase. The character performing the action learns something along the way. This may be as diegetic or game-mechanical as you please.
2. Mastery. The character can do this specific action again (in this same context) without any chance of failure.
3. Positive side-effect. Performing the action also causes an unexpected helpful outcome.
4. Good return. The action takes fewer resources than expected to accomplish, and/or yields more of some measurable outcome than it normally would.
5. Quick. The action takes half the time it normally would.
6. Quiet. The action is accomplished stealthily and subtly, or there's a distraction elsewhere that takes attention away from it.
7. Impressive. The character performs the action in a way that's inspirational, smooth, culturally appropriate, or garners public approval.
8. Stacking. The way this action changes the world makes it easier for allies or harder for foes to accomplish some related thing(s). *
9. Discovery. The character performing the action finds something (information or an object) when they attempt it. *
10. Easier than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something that makes the task easier than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Again, the last three entries may require changing the details of the world. You'll need alternatives if you don't like that.

The benefits of table-based twists

There are three main benefits to this approach.

1. SALIENCE. The simple procedure means easy referee decisions. It reminds the ref of various outcomes that should be possible. And it's a quick way of selecting between side effects.
2. PLAUSIBILITY. The tables are fairly general. Rolling twice and picking the more plausible twist is easier than having to think of a particularly suitable possibility, but is quick and flexible.
3. PERMISSIVENESS. When a game system doesn't overtly empower the referee to intervene in small ways, adding a defined procedure feels less arbitrary. The one I've written up is neutral with regard to the player characters; in games where characters are more skilled than their opponents, it may even be a small advantage.

You no longer need as many specific rules for monsters, traps, etc, because it all works inside the established fiction of the world. Now if a monster is described as having a hard shell, whenever "Weapon breaks" is one of the rolled options you'll instinctively pick that one without thinking too hard about it.

Alternatively, you can hang stuff off the procedure to extend it.

• A cursed sword might always favour the "Ally harmed" twist when rolled as an option, and doubles the effect when it happens.
• A sticky jelly monster always permits "Lost grip" as a third option to choose between, so that more and more swords end up stuck inside it.

The procedure can be completely player-facing if you want. In story-telling games you could even make the choice of twist a collaborative decision.

You could also use the twist procedure to simplify rules-heavy games, turning their specialised action outcomes into simple table entries and then discarding their complex action resolution mechanics.

Finally, you could build your own tables to come up with task-specific results. If your game is mainly about tracking, you probably want a tracking-specific table of twists.

A potential drawback: Combat asymmetry

This will give you different ratios of good and bad side-effects depending on the number of combatants involved. If a dozen characters fight one giant, or fifteen minions fight one player character, there's a risk of the solo combatant being buffeted by constant 'bad luck' due to the sheer number of rolls the other side is making.

Ultimately this comes down to choice of trigger. Some possible adjustments: Only accept the first two twists that get rolled each round (for combat systems with initiative). Only take the biggest margin of success from each side (for combat systems where everything happens at once). Identify one-vs-many situations and change the trigger to benefit the one. Give boss monsters the power to ignore the first negative twist they would suffer each round.

And of course you can codify rule zero. The referee should simply reject a twist if none of the possibilities rolled seem suitable for the situation. That way a mob of gnomes can't keep knocking the giant over, making her drop her club, etc.

Finally

I should note that this procedure is untested, but I hope to give it a go at the table in the future. I'd love to hear if you have thoughts or feedback. Leave a comment or let me know on Bluesky or Mastodon!

 

The art in this post is by Gordy Higgins. Used with permission.

When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!

The retconned lifepath

I want to develop an idea about a novel RPG progression mechanic which was pitched here:

https://www.tumblr.com/alexanderwales/771838390587047936/pitchposting-retcon

The main idea is this: it's a narrative game where the majority of the gameplay involves placing the pieces of your own past.
[...]
So the whole game would be this: slowly adding to your own backstory, penning yourself in over time, until there's no room to maneuver anymore, and shortly thereafter, the game ends. The fundamental tension of the game is that you want to keep the character as amorphous as possible, to commit to as few details as possible, but commitment is necessary to actually accomplish things.
[...]
in this game "progression" does not come from increasing skills because you got better, it comes from defining the past.

I view this as an interesting twist on lifepaths.

 

Refresher: Lifepath mechanics

In TTRPG gaming, characters are classically generated by picking character elements (or clusters of them) from a set of options, supplemented with dice rolls to instantiate numerical attributes. Most games still do something in this vein.

A lifepath character generation system switches this up. Now you make early life decisions as your character, and/or roll to see what happened to them before gameplay began, and the outcome of that process is your character's start state.

(Aside: I made a comprehensive lifepath character generation book for D&D 5e which you can check out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/438774/Steps-to-a-Hero)

Lifepaths are an attractive alternative because they (can) restrict a player's decisions to only those of their character, not a bunch of things that their character was never in a position to choose themselves like their 'intelligence' stat. As a result,

• They add more gameplay to the game
• They feel more real
• They reduce the pressure on the player to be creative
• They replace the part of a role-playing game that has little to no role-playing (character generation) with a version that is mostly role-playing

Refresher: Retcon mechanics

Retcon is retroactive continuity. It's a broad category of ideas, and 'deciding parts of the past which were left undecided' is just one very narrow part.

The main RPG retcon mechanic I'm familiar with is the one Alexander Wales mentions in his pitch. Blades In The Dark, the GLOG, etc, permit a character by 'careful preparation' to retcon in things they have available to them, e.g., by carrying a bundle of unspecified equipment.

Outside of RPGs, something like this is a common part of story-telling games, where there are mechanisms for a player (as opposed to game master) to determine or replace parts of the world, often to the benefit of a character favoured or controlled by that player.

 

A possible synthesis

So we have this idea for, essentially, building a character by determining underdetermined bits of a lifepath.

➡️ Let's say characters all start at age 25, having had formative experiences since the age of 15, and initially have just one or two of their traits determined.

➡️ There's experience points, and you 'spend' xp at any time to declare how you 'spent' one year of your life (a nice little verbal correspondence).

➡️ Each year of your life grants you an appropriate character trait: an ability, skill, power, whatever.

➡️ Each trait you 'gain' in this way is, of course, one you've always had within the continuity of the game world. You're just revealing it now.

So you decide you spent a year traipsing the desert trade routes, and get increased endurance. Or you were pressed into military service as an archer, and are capable with a war bow. Or you spent a year repairing fishing trawlers, and have basic sailing and carpentry skills.

This setup allows for ten "level-ups", one for each adult / young adult year of your life prior to starting the game proper. You could tweak the time periods to get more buffer. If you do bump into the end game having 'spent' all your undetermined years, the game master would need to contrive a year-long time skip between adventures for the player characters to keep progressing, or switch to a different progression system.

Other than managing time, I see two main open problems. They're shared by most retcon / story-influencing mechanics:

1. Things in the game world can / should be able to interact with your character's history before you're "ready" to determine it. When this happens, the choices are: do the character advancement early, contrive a way out of revealing (deciding) it, or suffer contradiction later on.
2. When you do determine part of your character's history, it may make previous in-character choices and outcomes seem very stupid indeed. "You're telling me you apprenticed as an acrobat for a year? So have you been deliberately clumsy these last few weeks?"

 

Closing thoughts

By its nature, I think as a class of game mechanic this idea leans a bit towards the story-telling game end of the spectrum. It doesn't have many of the advantages of lifepaths which I mentioned.

It's a way for players to influence the overall narrative or game world more than their character's decisions. So I think if you were to develop it further, you'd be better off implementing it in a story-telling game or hybrid game rather than a 'strict' TTRPG.

'Reasons for reactions' to improve random encounters

You don't want your encounters, especially random encounters, to be susceptible to is-this-a-combat-or-do-we-ignore-it thinking.

Plenty has already been written about giving encounters extra contextual details (where are the creatures, what are they doing, what are they hiding, etc).

But it's also important to give the encountered characters the appearance of agency by varying their reactions. The orcs don't always attack on sight. The halflings don't always ask you to join them in a meal.

So how do they feel about you?

Different games go to different lengths with this.

🟩🟩✅ Varied reactions: The rules randomly modify how aggressively a particular set of encountered creatures react, in some way. Most games do this.

🟩✅✅ Default reactions: The rules specify a creature's or group's default reaction (friendly, suspicious, wary, indifferent, curious, issues challenges, hostile, fearful, neutral...), and modify this with a dice roll.

✅✅✅ Motivated reactions: The rules provide plausible reasons for encountered creatures deviating from the default reaction (in case the GM struggles to tie it all together).

That last approach, motivated reactions, is a very useful tool but few games do it. So here are some appropriate options you can roll or pick.

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually friendly:

1. unusual individual/leader
2. need a favour
3. recently sated
4. intimidated and trying not to show it
   
5. hiding a secret
   
6. smell food on the party
7. recent festival, harvest, windfall, or celebration
   
8. hoping to steal / other deceit
9. feeling secure after recent victory
   
10. party is a reminder of old friend(s)
    

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually hostile:

1. on high alert after recent attack
   
2. mistaken identity
3. resource-starved and desperate
4. rabid or maddened
5. hiding a secret
6. already in bad mood
   
7. subject to tyrannical orders
8. party inadvertently breaking taboo/custom
   
9. fear of reprisals from a greater threat
10. bandits, soldiers, hated nemeses sighted in area
    

"The minotaur is trying not to disturb a spider's web by moving, and settles for glaring at you balefully."

It's infamously difficult to get across motivations, secrets, and motivations at the table, so signal the reasons as clearly as you can to the players. Your encounters will have more verisimilitude, be more engaging, and be easier to improvise.

One mechanic to fix RPG spellcasting

(Or, well... it's an untested work-in-progress idea for fixing the things that usually irk me about it, personally.)

Magic has to be constrained, obviously, to avoid just having an instant win button that any wizard can press at any time.

Fantasy game designers usually accomplish this by giving spellcasting certain factors:

• Limited uses (in the form of spell slots, power points, consumable resources, etc). Book-keeping, yuk. You also need to stretch to find a good in-world reason for the limits to exist and the character to be aware of them, so immersion doesn't break.
• Spells of different fixed power level. Usually these have to be unlocked. If only one high-level spell has some effect, then you'll never have a lesser magician who has a knack for that one spell, or can even use it. Different fixed power levels pairs with limited uses to have several consequences:
• Even more book-keeping (bleh).
• Spells often just succeed, or have a single opportunity to resist, because it sucks to have a valuable resource just do nothing.
  
• Strategic choices usually become obvious (and therefore boring). You might straight up stop using your weakest spells.
  
• If spells have different power levels and are only rate-limited then a spell can be exactly as powerful as you can bear if a wizard wants to cast it their allotted N times per day, every day, including in downtime. Get it wrong and some spells are too weak to bother with; others break the game. Usually both, and it gets worse the wider the range of power levels.
• Jarring styles of play. The wizards have expendable resources and an incentive to use them in overwhelming bursts and/or to solve every problem, as much as possible, and then switch to 'spell recovery mode' (usually rest). This doesn't apply to other characters (or it gets awkwardly levered in by giving them inexplicably rate-limited mundane powers).
  
• Quick casting. It's bad enough in D&D-likes, where most spells take six seconds to cast. That's on the shorter side of what I'd prefer. In more granular games like GURPS, they're often cast even faster.
  
• Not much ritual. If there's a big slow evil magical spell happening, it's almost always a plot point rather than a mechanically underpinned option, let alone the primary method of spellcasting. In a lot of the genre fiction, spells are cast over long periods, either building and building in power/effect, or building towards a moment where they take effect! I really like the feeling of this, and almost never see it in a RPG.
  

I think these four aspects are worth changing for their own sake. It's worth noting that they also lead to a 'best practise' which I dislike:

Bum-rush the wizard

The RPG spellcaster in combat is unarmoured or otherwise fragile, and makes up for this with a limited number of extra-powerful hits which they deliver quickly and at range without cost, and can usually snipe a specific target and/or affect swathes of foes at once.

That adds up to a nearly universally optimal strategy: bum-rush the enemy wizard. Expend resources or open yourself to risk in order to take out the spellcaster early; it'll be worth it.

This is made worse by the usual mechanical parity of NPC/PC spellcasters (a satisfying and useful part of most games which I'd like to keep). The strategy is also optimal when it's creatures fighting a PC party with spellcasters. Enemies either bum-rush the PC wizard or are complete idiots. The best you can do is switch up those two options, sometimes making it unpleasant for the PC wizard player and sometimes boring the whole group with stupid enemies.

Here's my solution so far.

 

One unified mechanic which solves all my problems

A spell has fairly minor base effects which always apply, and a buffet of advanced effects.

If you're not already casting a spell, you can always try to cast any spell you know. You must continue casting it if you want the effect to continue (no check) or build (requires check).

When you cast a spell, its base effects take place. When you continue casting a spell, you either maintain it, or you try to make it more powerful by adding an advanced effect. You can do this each round, for most reasonable definitions of 'round'. Each time you want to add an advanced effect to the spell you are casting, you must make an appropriate check, which becomes more difficult with each effect added.

If you spend a round winding down a spell you're casting to end it, there's no risk at all. If you choose to stop casting it abruptly, there's a small risk. If you're forced to stop casting by some interruption or injury, there's a moderate risk. And if you bite off more than you can chew with advanced effects and fail the spellcasting check, there's a high risk.

The more risk, the worse the potential outcomes when the spell ends, and the higher the weighting towards the worse outcomes. The spell might just fizzle or have some cosmetic effect, but then again it might lash out at or turn on the caster, or run horribly rampant. These effects could be generic, tuned to the spell, or both.

The more skilled at wizardry you are, the more likely you are to succeed on your checks, and therefore reduce the risks you face by casting a more sophisticated spell.

Examples

The mage's change spell only makes her target look like a frog, at first. As she adds more and more advanced effects, they become the size of a frog, and then become a frog, and then start thinking like a frog. By adding other advanced effects, she can make the spell last – first an hour, then a week, then permanently – even after she stops casting it.

The wizard raises a wall from the ground at the heel of his staff. As he walks, it follows in his tracks. He puts more effort in, and it changes from packed earth to sandstone, and then to granite. If he risks enough advanced effects, he can make it higher and thicker, or join it up and add features to turn it into a building, or make it last well beyond the time he spends casting. A skilled wizard with patience and a tolerance for repeated small risks could make a whole stone fortress, a little section at a time, and only have to renew it (say) once per year.

The warlock starts casting a spell to call lightning down on the enemy camp. Clouds gather, roil, and darken as she casts. If she releases it immediately, it will have no effect, but as she continues casting, an ominous glow signals more and more charge is gathering. The choice of when to actually bring the lightning down is a calculated risk. Wait too long, and it might lash out at her!

The evil cultist starts conjuring blood eels directly from the bodies of the victims. Over time, more and more of them exsanguinate, and the blood eels grow larger, more numerous, more self-directed, and roam further from the caster. If he doesn't want to push his luck, he can then maintain his swarm of eels for as long as he keeps casting.

Outcomes

So how about those desiderata from the start of this post.

Limited uses? Nope.

Spells of different fixed power level? Gone.

Quick casting? Not if you want to accomplish much!

Not much ritual? Effects build as the chanting continues, which is the key part; see also Possible Extensions, below.

The "bum-rush the wizard" strategy? Still useful, for PCs and NPCs alike, but not a no-brainer. When the wizard starts casting, he's not particularly dangerous. If you let him keep on casting, he eventually becomes very dangerous indeed ...unless he overreaches and destroys himself! We have arrived at "actual decision-making", the backbone of TTRPGs!

Corollaries:

• Casting a spell is a risk, so spells can be powerful and yet not rate-limited. Just play out the spell each time, to see whether something goes horribly wrong. The more powerful the effects you're invoking (and thus the more potential to 'break the game' when done over and over), the more likely you are to suffer catastrophe.
• Note that this requires negative outcomes to have actual major impacts, not just be slaps on the wrist. Otherwise you end up with a long, slow cycle of spend-resources-to-make-resources-to-fix-the-harm-which-occurred-while-making-free-resources-etc. It's going to work best in games where healing is neither easy nor quick, and where character death is a possibility.
• Character improvement for magicians is easy. You can take whatever approach you want with learning/acquiring spells or specific advanced effects, specialising in spells, etc. The main improvement is just in spellcasting skill: a better caster can reliably get more spell effects before something horrible happens. This is skill-system-independent, with one exception: casters shouldn't get so powerful that they can do magic without risk (except possibly for the weak base effects of the spell, which might be safely freely repeatable if that won't damage the setting).
• Certain styles of spell, with quickly-achievable instant fixed effects, wouldn't work very well with this. Your words of command, snap featherfalls, reflexive shields, wizard knocks/locks cast while fleeing, etc. But I'm confident that every interesting spell can be made more interesting with effects that build and layer.
• I expect this to work very well with progressive status conditions, Pathfinder-style. Binary save-or-suck is often a problem with magic systems. "Spells get more powerful as the casting continues" fixed that pretty directly.
  

There are games that have elements of this mechanic – the GLOG's wizards, which I like; games with spells you pump up over time like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; that one Conan game with open-ended / modular casting; any game with spell mishaps. I haven't seen anything exactly like this, but if I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know.

Possible Extensions

Off the cuff, ideas for advanced rules:

1. Capacity for the caster to change the spell they're casting on the fly by relinquishing specific advanced effects they added previously, lowering the check difficulty.
2. Extensions for counterspelling / duels of wizardry.
3. In some styles of game, advanced effects might be improvised rather than listed for the player.
4. Rituals involving long timespans and more casters: Increase the time requirement for each 'stage' of the spell, multiplying by some factor or by the number of casters. Get a benefit like reduced risk or easier checks for adding advanced effects.
5. Maybe everyone can do magic; the specialised wizards are just the ones who are good enough to do it with advanced effects and lower risk.
   
6. If you really wanted, you could add complexity back in by giving each advanced spell effect a numeric power level, and a corresponding increase to check difficulty.
   

Upon training your character's replacement

I was thinking about the value of a long time scale for fantasy TTRPG adventures, and how it actually ties in neatly with many aspects of old-school style of play:

• Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
• Delves and expeditions
• A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
• Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
• Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
• Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
• A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury

Let's say you implement seasonal play, as in e.g. http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-long-haul-time-and-distance-in-d.html. The PCs have a meagre initial home base. They have some local adventures and make some coin. Enough that they can plan a modest expedition, one that will take months. They come home and spend their wealth, advancing their characters, improving their base, and acquiring the resources for a big expedition, one that will take seasons to complete.

Now let's build on this basis, by adding some game elements to do with character advancement, followers, and character replacement, and see what other common rules might be tweaked.

Character advancement

Character advancement has a cost in looted wealth (e.g., at 1 gp = 1 xp or whatever works with your game rules). Up to half of looted wealth can be used for training; the rest is available for improving the characters' lives and pursuing their goals in other ways.

The requirement that xp must be from looted wealth (e.g. dungeon treasure) ties it back in to the idea that the characters are getting something out of their experiences on delves and expeditions, and also prevents advancement based on capitalism; it feels gamey, but not TOO gamey.

Looted wealth is used to pay for training, tutors, study materials, and so on. Early on, these things are readily available. At higher levels, they might have to be sought out in the world, as it gets harder to find more advanced texts, teachers more skilled than your character, and so on.

Character advancement therefore represents costly, high-intensity learning and study (with an undertone of the character having gone out and had perilous experiences, resulting in both the necessary wealth and the motivation to excel in the training). Advancement takes a long time; let's say a season per level. You could have a more fine-grained system with an increasing time requirement, though.

Followers and character replacement

From say level 2 or 3, players can acquire a number of followers. In D&D-likes, we might say they have followers up to one third of their Charisma score. In those games that already have fleshed-out follower mechanics, you'll need to call them something else or combine the systems.

Followers are just characters like any other, starting at level 1, created with the same character creation rules. They are distinguished from hirelings and other NPCs by an understanding at the table that they are essentially backup PCs; in particular, they won't ever betray the PCs, and they won't be killed 'off-screen' unless the players decided to send them into danger.

Players can invest looted wealth in their followers to advance them, exactly as for their primary PC. This has the same training costs and time and so on. A PC's followers can advance to 1 level lower than the PC and no further.

In-world, followers are squires, apprentices, butlers, bodyguards, family members, and so on. Some of a PC's followers might be their own apprentices (if the same class). But the wizard could retain a loyal housecarl, or the barbarian might have adopted a witch. And some of a PC's followers might be apprentices of other PCs.

The crucial detail for all of this: A player's next character will be drawn from their pool of followers. 

If a player's character is safe back home, the player may choose to retire that character, taking all its wealth and social connections and so on with it. If they choose retirement, the player can have some decent portion of the character's experience transferred directly to their followers, including their new character. Let's say, 50% of earned experience, with no more than 20% allocated to any one follower, and no advancement further than the level of the retiring character. Importantly, the old character then becomes a tool of the GM and is kept out of the way, not a free resource for the remaining PCs to hit up at any time.

But if a player's character dies, the player either takes on a new character at starting level or chooses a candidate from their followers.

Tweaking the rules

This framework works best when the cost of character advancement increases drastically with ever level (as in most editions of D&D). That way, a PC isn't terribly disadvantaged by diverting a split of their wealth/xp to maintain a small coterie of backups.

The GM may need to tweak the total size of wealth awards, and/or give a small bonus to any xp allocated to followers (so that it doesn't feel like the current character is losing out). There should be a balance; players should feel a tension between the risk of investing in their PC and the surety of investing in their followers (in case their PC dies).

Different play groups can organise things differently. One player could pick another's follower as a replacement if they agree, and possibly if a bonus/weregild is paid to compensate. Players could trade followers. A group might decide to divert some initial split of their loot into a set of replacement characters, then treat them as a communal resource.

Followers are also a resource in themselves, providing spells and character abilities and so on, giving additional incentive to invest in them. However, in a world where returning from death is cheap and easy, players won't feel as compelled to 'waste' xp on maintaining a pool of followers. The GM might need to make resurrection spells cost additional wealth/xp, or improve the rate of return on follower advancement, to balance it out.

This system would be easily adapted to a playstyle where everyone plays multiple characters at the same time.

What are the benefits?

So going back to that initial list of old-school play elements...

- Gold-as-xp, and treasure-hunting as the foundational mode of play
- Delves and expeditions
This framework, being predicated on plundered gold-for-xp, puts the focus squarely on treasure-hunting. Having a long time frame and big expeditions also helps emphasise the sheer amount of wealth in the adventure location: it's worthwhile planning a trek across the sea, continent, or world for.

- A slower, more plausible pace of character advancement including training costs for levelling up
- Costs for character death; replacement characters who aren't automatically the same power level as their predecessor
This framework achieves these while offering the players a lot of important choices. The long time frame with seasonal expeditions means that there are regular opportunities for the characters to advance via lengthy training without the pace of adventures precluding it, and without the game devolving into fine-grained in-world scheduling puzzles.

- Emphasis on investing in a base, community, big player-driven projects, and other aspects of the game world
Having increasingly huge amount of treasure in more distant and difficult-to-get to dungeons, alongside increasing wealth costs for levelling up, also helps with game world investment. PCs can do social climbing, come up with their own megaprojects, invest in capital, build fortresses, improve their communities, and so on, with the half of their looted treasure that they can't use for character advancement.

Having an expedition 'off season' (winter) creates room to breathe, and for PCs to get entangled in whatever the player finds compelling: planning, hiring, selling treasure, magic item creation, wheeling and dealing, starting a family, capital investment, politicking, dealing with long-term campaign events, and so on.

- Social connections, hirelings, delegation, and realm play
Expedition-based play encourages use of hirelings, and managing a coterie of followers ties in well with managing hirelings and paves the way to realm-based play. Travelling for a long time to an adventure location necessitates retaining staff or paying friends back home to tend to the character's other, broader concerns while the character is off adventuring.

- A slower or more 'realistic' time required to recover from injury
Not everyone cares about verisimilitude, but for those of us who do, the long time scale and the group of followers together permit a GM to tweak rules and powers towards needing long-term recovery. A character who gets injured has the time required to heal up before the next expedition. When a character is knocked out of a delve due to injury, their player isn't sidelined for a session or two; they have followers with them who can go in instead. Or they can attempt the risky proposition of having their PC continue while seriously injured, knowing they have the backstop of having levelled followers back home if 'injured' turns into 'dead' as a result.

...And finally, as the Against The Wicked City article noted, players will have a chance to actually update the age written on their character sheet.

On edge cases and magic

There's an innate design tension which RPG magic systems must contend with.

Magic must be more powerful than enacting the equivalent effect by mundane means, otherwise it's not fun and not fantastic. But if it's powerful and its uses are limitless (or at least non-rate-limited), then you become committed to an exceptionally high-magic setting.

If it takes ten seconds to give yourself a magical boon which lasts for ten minutes, the default player behaviour and the reasonable in-world behaviour will be to cast the spell every ten minutes... Unless they have a specific reason not to. That's almost always 'resource management'. In almost ever fantasy TTRPG, magic (whether spells, items, rituals, innate powers, etc) will be powerful and limited, i.e., a valuable resource; something to be conserved for when it will matter. Therefore, players will want to know the exact effect of some magic they might use, so that they can make an informed choice.

And this creates a design tension. How predictable to players is the magic their characters are harnessing?

The predictability predicament

Assuming you want magic to be able to do a huge range of things (it's magic), to get breadth of coverage, you either end up with these huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects and parameters (almost certainly player-facing), or you have a fuzzy system where the GM instantiates vague wordings at runtime (possibly via what amounts to negotiation with the player). These game design choices have different costs in terms of usability and satisfaction.

Most big, popular fantasy TTRPGs like D&D go with the huge, minutely-detailed lists of magic effects option. This arguably results in greater player agency, in the sense of being able to make good and meaningful decisions about resource allocation, but it constrains magic to the big official list (and if it's not exceptionally well-designed, you end up with weird codified corner cases and interactions). You also need to know the system really well to be effective as a player or a GM. Finally, there's a risk that presenting in exhaustive detail what is possible strongly implies that anything else isn't possible. You get cases like D&D 5e, where many destructive spells officially don't damage objects because a small subset of them specify that they do.

The fuzzy system option is attractive because it makes magic more 'mysterious' and wild, and thus fantastical. But it can be hard for a GM, especially one who isn't already operating in a "rulings not rules" tradition. But it can also be hard for players to come to terms with, unless either (a) it's the case in-world that a mage never knows exactly what they're going to get when they do some magic (which is flavourful, but risks a poor play experience), or (b) the GM and player together determine what happens when the magic is used. The latter might sound good (an opportunity for collaborative buy-in) or bad ('Mother May I' gameplay). Some GMs are surprised to find that many players hate 'collaborative storytelling exercises' spilling over into their roleplaying games. Either way, it doesn't actually resolve the tension: it's still in the player's best interests to stop and discuss the possible magical effect before they can make an informed choice whether to use their magic.

Variants of the fuzzy system where e.g. the GM has to follow certain rules to come up with a power-level-appropriate instantiation of a spell at run-time are close to being the worst of both worlds: mechanically fiddly but without giving a player enough information to make decisions with, and you just end up building that minutely-detailed canonical list slowly over time.

Resolving the tension

I consider this an open problem. As I've suggested before, I think the best practises are to

• Pick a path and stick with it, rather than mixing up how rigid and predictable the magic system is in different use-cases within the same game; and
• Have an extremely strong, well-thought out metaphysics which either underpins the mechanical design for the minutely-detailed lists option or informs what 'should be the case' for the fuzzy system option.

Food for thought

Here are some questions your magic system must be robust enough to answer, consistently:

If you turn flour to silver dust and mix it into acid, changing it to silver nitrate and creating heat, what happens to the silver nitrate if the spell wears off? What happens to the heat? If the compound is left over, can you reduce it to get silver? Does the resulting silver still count as being magical?

If you turn a pile of stones into loaves of bread and spend a week eating them, what happens to your tissue, the partially-digested bread, and the waste, if the magic ends? Do you die instantly? Does the energy you got from eating disappear?

If you turn a stone into a cat, and that cat eats and sweats and breathes makes waste, then the magic is dispelled, what happens to the bits of world (food and air and water) that got incorporated into the cat's body? Are they in the stone? Do they turn to stone? Can they be turned back? What happens to the cat's sweat and waste and loose hairs and skin particles out in the world? Do they turn to stone? What if the cat was a kitten, and it grew much bigger and older before the spell ended?

Or if the original subject was a mouse rather than a stone, what happens to the cells that changed in its body? Was there a 'mapping' from one mouse cell to multiple cat cells, so that injuries and shed cells and replaced cells carry back over? Do microbial diseases carry back over? Does cancer?

Are all your answers consistent so far?

What happens if you turn someone into a statue and snap their arm off? What about if you turn someone into steel and then temper or anneal the metal? Or take a mould of their body, turn them into ice, melt them, and then refreeze the water in the mould?

What about if you turn a piece of metal into a piece of wood and burn it inside a big tank of air? Does the carbon dioxide turn into a metal oxide? In general, if you heat something up while it's magically transformed and then turn it back, is it still hot? What if you turned something really small into something really big and then it just got slightly warm by soaking up a million times more sunlight than the tiny thing would have?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse and it eats a bucket of oats, what happens to the oats if it turns back? Does it matter whether they've been digested?

If you expand a mouse to be the size of a horse inside a mouse-sized terrarium that a mouse couldn't possibly break but a horse easily could, does the spell work? Does the answer change if the terrarium is nearly horse-sized? What about if you try it on a mouse that's inside a crack in solid rock? Is this meaningfully different from trapping a mouse under a piece of heavy cloth and then expanding it to the size of a horse?

If you cast a spell on a subject, then another one that seems to have the inverse effect (flesh to rock then rock to flesh), do you get back the exact original? If so, why? If not, what happens if only the first spell ends or is dispelled? What if you cast the first spell, then make some orthogonal change to the subject, then cast the second?

What in-universe mechanism decides whether an object counts as meeting the targeting requirements of a spell? Does a spell that works on chairs work on a one-legged stool if the caster doesn't think a one-legged stool is a chair?

Do any of the answers to these questions change depending on whether it's a temporary effect, a dispelled permanent effect, a magically reversed effect, an intrinsic ability of a magical creature, the effect of an item, etc?

Alternatives to Legendary resistance

Preface

Dungeons & Dragons 5e is a game that is fundamentally about combat. The outright majority of the game's mechanics and systems are geared that way. Of the ~25 pieces of information in a typical 5e monster stat block, 70 percent are combat stats and 20 percent are combat-related.

D&D 5e also offers tools for balancing combats by character level, purportedly with a fine degree of accuracy, and the Game Master's use of these tools is intrinsic to the core gameplay.

As a central, fine-tuned, high-stakes part of the game, combat therefore needs to work well and be satisfying.

Solo monsters

Some of the most archetypal tabletop gaming experiences pit a small group of player characters against one powerful, dangerous, usually large, monster.

But consider the boss and/or solo monster (and to a degree, monsters that appear in pairs or with a group of weak minions). In at least the last twenty years of D&D editions, boss monsters have suffered from a pair of related issues.

• First, they are often outplayed in the 'action economy'.
• Second, they are particularly vulnerable to 'save-or-suck' abilities, such that only one success is needed to trivialise the combat encounter.

5e does fairly well on the action economy stakes – at least, for legendary monsters which can enhance their multiattack or once-per-turn spell with lair actions and legendary actions. A GM who uses a non-legendary high-CR creature as a boss monster may find it falls behind in its ability to act (unless they pick something like the marilith or hydra, which have large numbers of attacks and extra reactions).

But 5e's approach to proofing bosses against save-or-suck is a blunt instrument.

Legendary resistance

D&D 5e is stuffed with status effects and such – banishment, restraint, incapacitation, sleep, save-or-die, paralysis, blindness, mind control, etc – which can be useful when levelled against a group of adversaries, but which risk trivialising a boss fight if pulled off.

The 5e designers were aware of this:

• Some ongoing status effects offer a saving throw repeated each turn to escape. (But there is little overall consistency on this.)
• Boss monsters tend to get improved saving throws.
• Boss monsters also fairly often have advantage on saves via Magic resistance.

This does help bosses resist neutralisation by save-or-suck. But because of the amount and flatness of a d20's variance, this risks turning the meta-game into action economy optimisation with a hint of roulette wheel.

So the designers also came up with the blunt instrument of 'Legendary resistance', to discourage players even trying save-or-suck spells in a boss fight. Three times a day, when a boss monster fails its save, it can choose to succeed instead.

And this basically works. It creates incentives to use alternative abilities (straight damage, buffing or summoning allies, no-save spells like Forcecage, Heat Metal, and Maze, etc).

Players can still try to double down on incapacitation if they really want to, but have to use attrition to penetrate the boss's saves and its uses of Legendary resistance. It becomes a hit points analogue, with high randomness and low granularity.

 

The problem is that just no-selling a player character ability isn't very fun at the table, and doesn't align well with other aspects of 5e's design.

It can also have unintended consequences. Player characters are incentivised in the meta-game to 'use up' the boss monster's Legendary resistance with their weakest, longest-range, and cheapest or most easily replenished abilities, while trying to disguise which ability they are using, to foil their adversary's ability to choose whether to no-sell something. This 'optimal tactic' can really throw you out of the game if you were expecting to be simulating a thrilling high-stakes encounter against a powerful monster.

Simple alternatives

Here are some ways you can change Legendary resistance to make it more fun and subtle, in order of least noticeable to most substantial change.

1. Make it have a cost. When Legendary resistance kicks in, the monster loses hit points, or a spell slot, or has disadvantage on saving throws until its next turn. This makes it more of an emergency measure but isn't always easy to justify in-universe.

2. Make it use up the creature's reaction. This at least means that the monster must be more selective about its use of Legendary resistance. If it has access to a special reaction like Parry or casting Shield, it also needs to balance against the possibility that it will want to use its reaction for that this round.

3. Make it a legendary action. One which can't be used on the same turn the saving throw was failed. The PCs get to capitalise on the status effect for at least one turn, and get to witness the monster actually do something to end the effect (e.g., giving a monstrous howl, straining its muscles, spitting up blood, clawing at itself). There's also the opportunity cost of legendary action selection.

4. Make it a bonus action. This is the same thing but more so: the creature must wait until its next turn to end the effect. If the boss monster has special bonus actions, now it must forego one to shrug off a status effect.

You could then give Legendary resistance variants to various not-necessarily-boss monsters that are "meant" to stick in a fight longer, replacing the unreliable high save bonuses + Magic resistance combination.

 

Complex alternatives

Finally, if you have the time and inclination, you could fully overhaul 5e's framework of status conditions.

One modern design paradigm is to stack worsening status effects / spell effects. For example, Pathfinder uses variable status penalties: clumsy, doomed, drained, enfeebled, frightened, sickened, slowed, stunned, and stupefied incrementally penalise checks and task DCs.

Once you have gradated rather than binary conditions, more powerful 'boss' monsters can be given a greater initial resistance to those effects, or a greater capacity to suffer them, or substantially higher values in all the numbers that will be penalised, or a special ability to reduce them over the course of combat.

Character class: Gestalt of magic items

Game idea status: Non-instantiated; untested

The pitch

In your next tabletop role-playing game, you play as a mismatched assortment of sapient magic items. You are seeking like-minded paraphernalia to add to your burgeoning hivemind. Underneath the magical finery and glowing gemstones is a small, timid commoner who doesn't really know what is going on, but who you have formed a fierce attachment to.

Being a magical treasure hoard

Character idea: You are four or five magic items, of various levels of intelligence and various capabilities. Parts of you can move. Others can perceive their environment. Others can communicate with the fleshy types, or puppet their movements. You work in superb co-ordination, each making the others stronger, and forming a gestalt entity stronger than the individual nodes in your network.

Possible appearance: An old biddy is napping in an ornate wooden throne which walks on four clawed feet, careful not to wake her. She grips a glowing sword as she snoozes – its blue blade dances this way and that, clearly moving her bony arm rather than the other way around. A griffon's head graven upon a shield glares from the top of the throne, held by an animated rope. In the old lady's lap is an hourglass absolutely dripping with fretwork skulls; within, the sand is frozen in time.

Motivation: You are lonely and incomplete. You seek missing members of once-paired items, objects of particular aesthetics to complete your look, magical swords of similar alignment, bored cursed amulets, and so on.

Terminology: You are a gestalt entity. Your prospective compatibility with other sapient magic items you might come across is your gestalt personality. The person you have convinced to carry all of your components around (the ones that can't carry themselves) is your host. They perform tasks for you and in return you shower them in good luck, ability bonuses, conjured food, saleable abilities, magical protections, and adventure.

Legal status: Chances are, the local magistrates' willingness to recognise you as a self-actualised individual is highly questionable. Even in the kind of utopia which does grant personhood to smart objects, you are likely still on the run from covetous dragons and other unsavoury types.

Niche protection: Are you kidding me?

Player characters and hosts

These objects have achieved concordance, or at least codependence, through a history of amicable cooperation. They fundamentally want to remain together; they have no interest in being separated.

Therefore, the character is never at risk of being "parcelled out" by other PCs.

Sapient artefacts are notoriously difficult for a living wielder or wearer to get on with nicely. You have problems of:

• Personality or alignment conflict
• Jealousy or disparagement of other magic items (and their different nature or perceived utility)
  
• Jealousy of the capabilities of the living, or criticism of their perceived weaknesses
  
• Pridefulness; expectation of obedience or submission from all other than the item's maker
  
• Disrespect of the long-lived and unbreakable for organic intelligences
  
• The desire to be carried at all times, to be treasured, to be maintained and given consideration above the bearer's more intrinsic goals
• Items having instinctual control over their wielder or wearer in various ways, and unwilling or unable to suppress it for long
  

It's a rare person indeed – and a meek, biddable one – who meets all the slightly different criteria of a whole assemblage of such items.

Therefore, the character is not at risk of disappearing because it "makes sense" for some other PC to wield and wear them all at once.

At some point, the gestalt entity's host – a person who is probably regarded as something between a valued servant, a sapient home, and a fascinating pet – might die. This is not sufficient reason for another PC to stand in, except as an extremely short, uncomfortable stopgap until the gestalt entity can travel to a population centre to begin the long, arduous search for another truly suitable host. This may or may not be considered a form of character death, dependent on the nature of the particular game.

Game mechanics

Take a character sheet and some scissors, and cut away everything but the important box which says 'equipment list'.

I'm not going to go so far as to instantiate this character class for any particular game system.

Obviously it's going to take some GM work. The following guidelines occur to me.

How to handle advancement:

• Start out with four or five magic items, able to communicate amongst themselves telepathically, visually, and/or tactilely. Between them they should have the ability to move around, communicate with other folks, protect themselves, perceive their environment, and do something that could be leveraged to make money to pay their way. They should also have a short list of utility or battle powers – say, one per item.
• The player should be (e.g.) picking from a set of pre-prepared candidate objects/powers rather than getting to pick all the details of the magic items for their starting gestalt character.
• For character progression, switch up between unlocking new powers per item, and adding new friends to the convergent hivemind. This character class is the perfect use case for 'found advancement'.
• Try to treat this as special; seed the world with possibilities. Don't just say "you're level seven now, so I guess another magic tiara with a compatible personality shows up and integrates with you. Here are its powers." Ideally, you should provide the player characters with leads and clues as to all sorts of things out there in the world and/or lost long ago, and if they pursue the more difficult, elusive, and dangerous ones, the rescued artefact is correspondingly stronger as a reward (after all, the other PCs will be getting more experience because of the higher challenge).
  

Possible items and powers:

• Three cuts from the elsewhere axe open a semi-permanent portal to wherever the last such cuts were made. Also breaks into extradimensional spaces.
  
• Hood of invisibility blinds the wearer while making them invisible. Not too much trouble when other items in the gestalt can do the seeing.
  
• Old slippers of agility are very comfortable; improve reflexes and stealth; worn through at the heels.
• Cursed hat of headlessness flies through the air carrying small weights; seeks legendary 'hatrack of lichkind'.
• Wand of force emanates dangerous gravitational waves and can be used to get around in a pinch.
• An old artefact has expended all its uses as a rod of reincarnation but can still summon woodland creatures and force them to sing.
• Classic flying carpet has powerful mobility and speed, little intelligence, follows its fellow objects like a lost puppy.
• Scarf of glittering fascination seeks other accoutrements in complementary colours; grants wearer powers of hypnosis and authoritative voice.
• Demanding helm keeps full-face visor open except to turn aside blows; acts as immovable rod in times of great and specific need.
• Half-finished golem, creator's whole civilisation long dead and their secrets gone with them, is missing its voice, one arm, and ability to turn around.
• Just the left glove of giant strength only provides said strength to the left side of the body; yearns for its twin.
• Animated tent can pitch self and walk short distances, dragging things with it; also predicts the weather and cleans shoes and tack.
  
• etc.
  

Peril, hit points, and death:

• The host should have baseline commoner statistics, likely boosted by some of the magic items in the gestalt. The person's hit points and skills and things never really go up, and don't matter too much. The player playing the gestalt entity is just kind of puppeteering them, just like the gestalt entity is in-world.
  
• It's possible to play this kind of character in 'high score mode', where the goal is to keep the same host alive for as long as possible while racking up as many magic items discovered and checked for compatibility as possible.
• Alternatively, to better fit in with other character types in a game where everyone is meant to experience true peril, the GM needs to do some work. I mentioned above that you can treat host death as character death by making it incredibly difficult to find a new host: the magic items can't get the quality of life they prefer without a host, so if it happens, they disappear from the campaign.
• You can also start rolling saves or tracking hit points and hardness or making destruction checks or whatever your system already uses for smashing objects up. This means it needs to be possible to repair at a similar pace to the in-game healing rate; that might already shake out of the system neatly, or you might need to make it a property of one of the sapient items.
  
• Regardless of approach, you could usefully level threats directly towards the aggregated items. After all, everyone wants a magic object or two, and this set is hanging around in the possession of some nobody! Alternatively, some of the items might be cursed or diabolic or spiritually aligned, in danger of being exorcised or corrupted or disenchanted. Note that a lot of players really hate when their characters are stolen from or kidnapped, so tread carefully with this.
  

Let me know

If you've tried this or something like it!

Other reading

Willful weapons and the trouble they cause: https://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=1648

Interesting magic items: https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2023/04/a-puzzle-from-1978-ad-1st-edition.html

Ideas for awoken magic items: https://githyankidiaspora.com/2015/04/20/wake-up-magic-items-wake-up-dccrpg/

A history of swords with ego: https://www.paulsgameblog.com/2018/01/28/ego-through-the-ages/

Difficulties with intelligent swords: https://www.tenkarstavern.com/2012/12/intelligent-swords-in-ad-1e-whats-with.html

Sapience in AD&D: https://periaptgames.blogspot.com/2023/04/a-puzzle-from-1978-ad-1st-edition.html