Sacrifices must be made!

Like many people, I am (laughably, pointlessly) engaged in writing my own OSR ruleset. My particular one is called Coin & Candle, and one of its defining features is the Sacrifice mechanic. It's very simple. Basically:

If you fail [a roll], you may volunteer to Sacrifice something. This lets you roll again and treat the best roll as the real one.

A Sacrifice could entail (for example): losing or damaging equipment, losing Hit Points, getting Impaired, making noise, wasting time, becoming Deprived, or anything else you think up. The important part is that the Referee considers it a meaningful cost in the circumstances.

Why do I think this is good?

1. It's simple.

If you're like me, you like the idea of resolution mechanics with more granular outcomes than a pass/fail binary. Mixed successes or critical failures can move things forward in delightfully unexpected ways. But if you're even more like me, then you've found that sometimes you really have to strain your brain to come up with complications to a player's success. It turns out that, in many cases, life really is a pass/fail binary. This increases the cognitive load for every roll and potentially slows things down.

The Sacrifice mechanic avoids this problem by, basically, making degrees of success opt-in. Rolls are simply binary unless the player declares they want to make a Sacrifice and proposes specifically what they will give up. After that, "success" becomes partial success and a "failure" turns into a critical failure, basically.

The fact the onus is solely on the player takes pressure off the referee. Of course, the referee is free to suggest what a Sacrifice could be if something occurs to them, but the fact they don't have to makes their life easier.

2. It's active.

A side-effect of Sacrifices being a player's choice is that... well, it's their choice. They are still actively engaged after the die is rolled, rather than passively receiving a narration of their fate. They're still making mechanical decisions! They have more options! It gives them agency and makes them feel more directly involved.

A side-side-effect is that this will (I hope) take some sting out of partial successes and critical failures. It's easy to feel mocked by fate when you roll a critical fail in other systems, but when it happens in Coin & Candle you know you went into it with your eyes open, and it feels less arbitrary. They have ownership over the outcome and so it doesn't feel as bad.

3. It's associated.

Sacrifices are meant to be diegetic. So if you Sacrifice to succeed at picking a lock (a "partial success", basically), that might mean you had to use a bit of force, meaning the lockpick breaks or it's obvious someone has tampered with it. What this means is that the choice faced by the player and the PC is the same. None of this "You get the chest open, but because it's a partial success a guard coincidentally enters the room!" bollocks.  I just like this because it helps you get inro the head of your character a bit more.

4. It makes combat less deadly without diminishing the sense of danger (and also makes it more dynamic).

This one is more a matter of taste, but I think Sacrifices particularly shine in combat. In C&C, no one (especially a PC) has a lot of HP. On paper, it's not that improbable that you're just one-hit killed without having the chance to do anything (something true of many OSR systems). Some people love this; I know for a fact my players hate this (they made sure of that).

Say an enemy rolls really well and a PC is lined up to take 5 damage. They have 2 HP. The player can choose to, I don't know, drop their weapon in return for a reroll.  They do so, and as a result only take 1 damage. The referee narrates how the PC makes a desperate dive, and the blade aimed at their heart merely gouges their arm. As a result, they lose their grip on their sword and it lands at their opponent's feet.

The ability to Sacrifice makes immediate death less likely, but the sense of danger is not decreased because:

1. you were still put into a bad position;
2. you saw how much damage you were about to take, and know how narrowly you avoided it; and
3. when you Sacrifice, you can still potentially fail!

Two things are accomplished: the player was given an interesting choice, and the fight developed in an exciting and unforeseen way instead of simply ending. Much better than a simple hit or miss, in my opinion.

Combat Sacrifice Table (d10)

Because of how frequent combat is likely to be, I thought it would be wise to have a random table of potential combat Sacrifices. Just to ease mental load, keep things moving, and keep things unpredictable.

1. Something in one of your hands is broken/dropped.
2. Your pack is torn open, and the contents spill everywhere.
3. You are knocked down.
4. A random item in your pack/belt is damaged.
5. Your ankle is sprained.
6. Dead arm (one arm useless for the rest of the fight).
7. Foes are enraged. They focus fire on you next round. If they were already after you, their attacks get a +1 bonus.
8. Blinded until you spend an action clearing your eyes.
9. Winded (you may only move or act next round).
10. Stunned (you cannot do anything next round).

Perhaps if the player can't think of a suitable Sacrifice they can consent to roll on this table.

5E Only Has One Class

I want to preface this by stating, as clearly as possible, that I don't think 5e's hyper-fixation on violence is immoral or unhealthy or harmful. It's only make-believe, after all. You might get that idea, reading this post, but it's not the violence per se that bothers me. It's the way violence fills up the whole experience and eclipses everything else.

Anyway...

This essay disorganised rant was prompted by a blog post I read a couple weeks ago that I can't find anymore. I think it was by Prismatic Wasteland? Anyway, the post was about something unrelated but there was a tangent at one point where the author opined (committing OSR heresy) that 5e is Good Actually, and in particular Good because players feel like they have a ton of flexibility to create the kind of character they want to be.

This gasted my flabbers.

Now, while 5e isn't my personal cup of tea, I don't begrudge others for liking it. But I was astonished someone would describe flexibility in character creation as a strength of 5e when the lack of that flexibility is one of 5e's defining flaws, in my opinion.

I guess at first glance it seems like your imagination is the limit. You can be a swashbuckling swordswoman! A wizard who commands fire and lightning! A phantom assassin! A brilliant weaponsmith! An invincible berserker! An infallible sharpshooter! A holy crusader! Et cetera, et cetera.

But do you see what all those have in common? Those are all characters defined by the violence they can inflict. Yeah, you can kill with a sword, or a fireball, or a bear, but the end result is the same. All of 5e's classes are just subclasses of the Big Class that all PCs belong to: Killer.

This inflexibility is everywhere once you notice it. Most of the class and subclass features make you more effective in combat. Most of the spells are variations on "gun" or "bomb". Almost all characters made with point buy are combat-optimised and thus interchangable (i.e. main attribute high, DEX and CON just behind it, everything else as low as possible).

So I guess it's true that you can make whatever kind of character you want, provided you want to make a superpowered warrior of some kind. Which, hey, might be enough freedom for most people (I do not mean that condescendingly). To me it just feels like such a narrow band to work in.

The result is that PCs don't feel distinct enough for me (mechanically, at least). You can't really have a team of diverse specialists like a classic heist film; everyone is a violence specialist differentiated by their secondary skills.

Now, the (non-Bethesda) Fallout games? Those had freedom in character creation. You could, if you wanted, be hilariously incompetent at fighting in all its forms and get by solely on hacking skills or having strong friends or cheesing the casinos and buying your way to victory. You never have to put skill points into guns. You can forgo all combat-related traits and perks. And that character's journey through the wasteland will be fun and interesting in a completely different way than that of a character with maxed-out Melee and the Slayer perk.

Compare 5e: everyone has weapon proficiencies, whether they want them or not. Rogues have to have Sneak Attack. Druids have to have Wild Shape. Spellcasters always have the option to take combat spells. 

Yeah, I guess you could just ignore your combat abilities in actual play. But if an ability is on your sheet, it's informing your character even if you don't use it. Here's an example: your rogue technically can do big damage with Sneak Attack but always chooses to lie or evade or bribe instead. But that's not quite the same as in Fallout, is it? That rogue isn't not a killing machine, they're just a killing machine who has sworn an oath of pacifism.

5e can't give you the completely different experience of being a noodle-armed weakling who avoids fights because they have to,  who relies on wits and guile because they have to. The closest it can give is being a big-dick swaggering badass temporarily dwarfed by an even bigger-dicked dragon. (what the fuck am I talking about?) You can't play as a grandma who specialises in brewing potions without that granny also being able to fuck up the average bandit effortlessly. You can play a craven, silver-tongued conman only if that conman is physically able to go toe-to-toe with an owlbear and not die instantly.

Am I making any sense? Removing options can give you more freedom! (really though, what the fuck am I talking about?)

So I guess that was a very long way of saying that I disagree with the idea that 5e gives you lots of character options and, in fact, I find 5e character creation chafingly restrictive.

... why did I spend my whole morning writing this?