This week I have a few questions regarding what you think of different mechanics and design decisions in the Dragonlance Fifth Age SAGA system. These questions mostly just concern your opinions, given your particular play style preferences.

• SAGA is somewhat unusual in that PCs are the only characters that make mechanical actions. What are your thoughts on this? Do you like it? Not like it? Why? Are there types of games when you would like or dislike it, in spite of your general preferences?
  
• SAGA tries to get around the “it takes only one Stealth failure to give away the entire group” issue by formalizing the party roles of Sentry and Scout. Do you think this is a good solution? Do you have an alternate way to handle things you would prefer? Do you like it? Not like it? Why?
  
• In SAGA your hand is both your luck and your HP. What do you think of this? What about it do you like or dislike? Why?
  

SAGA is somewhat unusual in that PCs are the only characters that make mechanical actions. What are your thoughts on this? Do you like it? Not like it? Why? Are there types of games when you would like or dislike it, in spite of your general preferences?

I don't really have a preference for it. It hasn't impacted my game play much, although I think that it makes the game less swingy, in some ways. For example, enemies always hit unless you can dodge them means that there aren't enemies landing surprise critical hits from exploding dice, or what have you. I do find in certain instances it's kind of frustrating (Enemies ganging up on people, creating really high dodge target numbers and really high damage) but it's a minor argument.

SAGA tries to get around the “it takes only one Stealth failure to give away the entire group” issue by formalizing the party roles of Sentry and Scout. Do you think this is a good solution? Do you have an alternate way to handle things you would prefer? Do you like it? Not like it? Why?

I was just thinking about this yesterday actually, and I kind of really like. Often sneaky characters are held back or nullified by the rest of the party being unwilling to invest properly to allow the sneak to properly use their skills in combat/ambush. I kind of like “One character can elevate the party” more than “One character can be held back by the party”. I can see how this could be frustrating for a GM, since one particularly skilled sneakthief can ensure a lot of sneak attacks for the party, but as a player, it's a feature I really enjoy. It seems like we never get to land our own ambushes in another game because, no matter how good we are, someone rolls poorly. Here we actually get to, you know, excell and land our own ambushes for once!

In SAGA your hand is both your luck and your HP. What do you think of this? What about it do you like or dislike? Why?

I don't know if “Luck” is the right term, since there is no alternative. It's not like you can flip off the top of the deck if you dislike all your cards in hand. But I do know what you mean and I do find it interesting. The “Cards are hitpoints” thing are kind of curious and means that a bad hand should be cycled as quickly as possible in case you take a high damage hit. This is less relevant given the prevalence of healing in the game (says the healer), but is interesting conceptually and, I think, works well and achieves the intended goal of making handsize matter.

SAGA is somewhat unusual in that PCs are the only characters that make mechanical actions. What are your thoughts on this? Do you like it? Not like it? Why? Are there types of games when you would like or dislike it, in spite of your general preferences?

I think the PCs being the only one to make mechanical actions probably speeds up the game and doesn't result in problems with one or more GM hands needing to use the deck. Still, it does remove any sort of randomization from NPC results, so to-hit values and get-hit values can usually be predicted after a round or two. I don't really mind this, though this usually means there is a push toward the optimal action at each point. For example, with a known to-hit, a united attack with the player with the weaker hand cycling a card is often a good decision.

I think combats where the PCs are heavily outmatched might make this lack of randomization problematic, but honestly, more randomization can also hurt PCs. I don't like or dislike it. It fits this game, it would not fit others.

SAGA tries to get around the “it takes only one Stealth failure to give away the entire group” issue by formalizing the party roles of Sentry and Scout. Do you think this is a good solution? Do you have an alternate way to handle things you would prefer? Do you like it? Not like it? Why?

I like the Sentry/Scout system. It gets around the problems of “the clumsy guy gives the group away” or “the stealthy people go off and have an adventure, while the rest play cards in an alley.” It may not be entirely realistic (clumsy guy is still clumsy), but it plays well. I like it for this sort of system, but I'm don't think it fits every system. It would feel weird in a very simulationist or tactical game.

In SAGA your hand is both your luck and your HP. What do you think of this? What about it do you like or dislike? Why?

The HP and randomizer being the same thing is odd. In a given session, my character's “full health” varies considerably. I can have anywhere 6 hit points to 55 hit points when fully healed. Some of those cards can result in awesome trumps, and some can result in further injury and penalties. My character's physique has very little to do with this except when he takes damage. I like it for this system since it fits, but I would find it frustrating in a more generic system. I could see it working for settings like supers, but not for gritty noir or cyberpunk settings.

Building on what Kat said, I actually think the best way to cycle a bad hand is to get hit, go down, and have the healer give you a new hand. Three lost actions to replace 6 cards is actually mechanically efficient. And sort of wrong. Sort of fits with my answer a few weeks back about times when the best mechanical choice and narrative choice contradict.

SAGA is somewhat unusual in that PCs are the only characters that make mechanical actions. What are your thoughts on this? Do you like it? Not like it? Why? Are there types of games when you would like or dislike it, in spite of your general preferences?

I don't have a strong opinion. It makes things somewhat more predictable, which is a double edged sword. On the one hand, having both parties roll can make results pretty wildly unpredictable. On the other hand, there are actions in SAGA machine that I won't even try as they are literally impossible without that slim possibility of the opponent rolling low at the same time I roll high. It eliminates those “hail mary” desperate rolls.

SAGA tries to get around the “it takes only one Stealth failure to give away the entire group” issue by formalizing the party roles of Sentry and Scout. Do you think this is a good solution? Do you have an alternate way to handle things you would prefer? Do you like it? Not like it? Why?

I like that they identified this common problem and attempted to solve it (which is more than most games do), and I think it works at first pass. But I have concerns about it from a general design philosophy standpoint, as I tend to dislike systems that let players get away with hyper-specializing and then allowing only the best person at a given task to ever roll it. To me it makes things feel hollow and takes a lot of the hard choices out of character creation (if you have a stealth guy, no need for anyone else to take stealth).

That being said I absolutely acknowledge that the party all-or-nothing way stealth is usually handled is untenable. I'm not saying go back to that.

I'm not sure what the alternative is, but I have some ideas. I think the simplest one isn't really an official mechanic, but a change to the default way of running these encounters. Just stop making it all or nothing. If some party members fail and some succeed on a stealth roll, just let the party members who succeeded get a surprise round, and then everyone else acts normally.

Something else I've been doing in my D&D games recently is also not an official mechanic but more of a rule of thumb for setting difficulty. When I set my DCs/target numbers for skill checks, I often default to the following baselines:

• If everyone rolls, and the party will fail if any one member fails, use a “very easy” DC (or two notches easier than it would normally be). Ex. party stealth rolls.
  
  If a random person is nominated to roll, and things fail if they fail (Or if everyone rolls individually and suffers their own consequences) use an average DC. Ex. Springing a trap, a perception roll on a random person's watch, endurance rolls to survive the elements
  
  If the party can nominate their best person and the parties success or failure depends on that roll, use a hard DC (or one step harder than normal). Ex. most tracking and survival rolls.
  
  If everyone rolls and the party succeeds if anyone succeeds, use a “very hard” DC (Or two steps harder than normal). Ex. Party perception rolls, most knowledge or lore rolls.
  
  

In SAGA your hand is both your luck and your HP. What do you think of this? What about it do you like or dislike? Why?

Generally bad. I think as a mechanic it's more cute than it is functional. On it's face it seems elegant, it uses the cards that are already there, it's a clever little mechanic. But it makes an uber-stat even more uber, and it makes getting a good hand even better and a bad hand even worse.

Brian
In SAGA your hand is both your luck and your HP. What do you think of this? What about it do you like or dislike? Why?

Generally bad. I think as a mechanic it's more cute than it is functional. On it's face it seems elegant, it uses the cards that are already there, it's a clever little mechanic. But it makes an uber-stat even more uber, and it makes getting a good hand even better and a bad hand even worse.

Hand size is certainly an uber-stat in SAGA. I kind of think of it as a D&D-ism. In D&D the biggest decider of your HP is your level. In SAGA your “adventures” count is basically your XP and your reputation is basically your level. In D&D you gain hit dice as you increase in level. In SAGA you gain hand size as you increase in reputation.

In D&D you roll hit dice to determine your max HP. In SAGA you draw a card with a random value to determine your effective HP. The only real difference here is that in D&D you roll once randomly and then have to live with the results. In SAGA you roll/draw them more frequently.

That said, I actually see “treating your hand as HP” as making a bad hand less bad–at least in the context of Dragonlance SAGA. Having a bad hand means you go down faster. But doing that also allows you to flush the bad cards that much faster. If hand wasn't HP, that would end up being a much slower process.

Note that this is only true so long as healing is plentiful and going down isn't all that bad. In a different game with less frequent healing or more lethal consequences, the risk/reward calculation between going down and flushing your bad cards may be different.

SAGA is somewhat unusual in that PCs are the only characters that make mechanical actions. What are your thoughts on this? Do you like it? Not like it? Why? Are there types of games when you would like or dislike it, in spite of your general preferences?

I think everyone else has pretty much covered it. I can't think of a game where I am honestly super invested in knowing that the bad guys are also “taking actions” with a randomizer or something rather than just throwing a number at me that I need to deal with. It does make things more predictable to an extent, but I kind of like that. If I'm going to be playing cards to accomplish something, I like to have some idea of where my success/failure spread stands so I don't throw away good cards trying the impossible, etc. It does make team-ups almost disproportionately effective, though - we've generally only been using them when two of us are not able to hit normally, but having two already-competent people team up seems to me like it would result in some pretty amazing unavoidable attacks. Certainly, the one or two times it's been used against us it's been pretty scary.

SAGA tries to get around the “it takes only one Stealth failure to give away the entire group” issue by formalizing the party roles of Sentry and Scout. Do you think this is a good solution? Do you have an alternate way to handle things you would prefer? Do you like it? Not like it? Why?

It's definitely better than the “one fails, everyone fails” model, but I'm with Brian in that I'm not crazy about it letting everyone else just dump scores that only one guy needs. It's interesting that Leader was clearly an attempt to do something similar, but the Leader is also constrained by their Presence score and code. It might make sense to make that the case for Sentry and Scout too, especially because Presence is a stat which, in its regular application, it's very easy to get away with only one person having it. I personally find it a little silly that Phork can maneuver the party into masterful ambushes just because he personally is good at sneaking around. He is literally incapable of remembering how many people are in his party when they're not in visual range, how the heck is he planning ambushes?

In SAGA your hand is both your luck and your HP. What do you think of this? What about it do you like or dislike? Why?

For the most part I dig the elegance of how that makes wound penalties work, but it really underlines just how screwy healing is in the SAGA Dragonlance system. Not…bad, exactly, but screwy. Even if Kat's character were the only one with Healing, she can heal somebody for their full hand size like five times a day with no problem, and that's assuming no one bothers with the free First Aid that requires no check or expenditure of resources. We've never taken that much damage in a day that I can remember, even in the incredibly ill-advised Brute fight, and there are three or four other people who ALSO have Healing and have seldom needed to use it. The upshot of this is that someone with a crappy hand both sucks at life and is more fragile, and the apparent intended solution within the framework of the system is for them to go get the stuffing kicked out of them and get healed into a better hand.

I mean…what? This is fine from a game balance perspective, I guess, but from a narrative or simulationist viewpoint it's totally ridiculous.

beholdsa
Hand size is certainly an uber-stat in SAGA. I kind of think of it as a D&D-ism. In D&D the biggest decider of your HP is your level. In SAGA your “adventures” count is basically your XP and your reputation is basically your level. In D&D you gain hit dice as you increase in level. In SAGA you gain hand size as you increase in reputation.

I don't necessarily object to having something that uber; I just think that a stat that uber shouldn't vary from player to player (as character level usually doesn't vary from player to player in modern D&D).

beholdsa
In D&D you roll hit dice to determine your max HP. In SAGA you draw a card with a random value to determine your effective HP. The only real difference here is that in D&D you roll once randomly and then have to live with the results. In SAGA you roll/draw them more frequently.

In D&D I always prefer to houserule to take average hp. (I think even rolling in modern D&D, you'll have less variance by the midlevels due to the large static component of D&D hitpoint totals. Generating up a few hundred trials seems to confirm it, but I don't have the time to figure out the statistics right now)