soft/HARD ability design (not just for GLOG)

 

Andrew Porter

I’ve been thinking a lot about GLOG class design. In the process of stealing liberally from everyone else’s GLOGgy posts, I’ve started categorizing abilities in terms of their relative softness/hardness. This has helped me sus out which ideas might be useful to my own hack and which I should trim.

[That thing I said about posting sundays was a guideline. I’ll be posting at LEAST once a week, with Sunday being the deadline for a given week.] 

Mechanical/“soft” Abilities

Arguably the most common type of ability in RAW D&D. Anything where the text can be boiled down to “+X to Y when Z” is this kind of ability. Most abilities that ask you to roll more dice are also this. “You can attack twice per turn” is a soft ability, as are “reroll and take the higher result” and “you can hire twice as many hirelings”.

The defining characteristic of a “soft” ability is its adherence to RAW game mechanics; +2 AC can insert itself into the calculations of combat math with little to no additional narrative effort.

Because soft abilities are often statistical in nature, they are a lot more “solvable” than hard abilities. I think Arnold referred to good class design as making decision between incomparables; soft abilities are very comparable.

In large enough quantities, soft bonuses can bog the game down with arithmetic, but don’t let FoP* scare you away; soft abilities can be so much more than number crunch, particularly if condition (Z) plays into the class fantasy. Assassinate (Goblin Guts) is a good example of this: up to +5 damage in the first round of combat, but the condition for getting that bonus is interesting and engaging.

*Fear of Pathfinderization 

Jonas Akerlund

Narrative/HARD Abilities

Hard abilities are abilities that change the game’s NARRATIVE without interacting with its MECHANICS. A bunch of the Knave spells are this. Other examples include “You always know which way is North” and “You can’t be interrupted while giving a speech.”

Normally, you’d expect “hard” to refer to number crunch and “soft” to refer to narrative fluff, so why are they backwards here? For me, hard abilities FEEL harder than soft abilities. For example, an ability that says “this PC can fly” feels more solid than “+5 to flying checks” because no amount of random chance can change it; you fly, that’s it, end of discussion.

I like to think of hard abilities as tools for forcing the DM’s hand. When a player says “my ability lets me steal the villain’s pants,” the DM is put on the spot to resolve this in the game universe. I believe this is a very good thing; well-designed hard abilities should allow the DM to join in on the experience of discovering the story through gameplay by letting the players strong-arm the fiction.

At the same time, hard abilities have a lot of potential to break the balance of the game. This can be balance between character classes or balance between PCs and monsters, if you’re more of a war-gamer type. The “X times per Y” rider is pretty common here to keep things under control.

Well designed hard abilities are both specific and open-ended, allowing the player to bend the rules in a very select field of interest. A good example is Great Escape (Goblin Guts, again): 1/day escape anything that’s restraining you, including awkward social situations.

One final note: HARD abilities trend towards the system-agnostic, so they’re easy to steal wholesale for your own game.

Vladimir Matyukhin

Moh’s Scale

Knowing what kind of game you want to run can help you determine where you should fall on the soft-hard scale. I personally prefer the hard end, so I often find myself redesigning class abilities towards the latter.

Example: I initially stole Lexi’s Trophies for my own Fighter because I liked the idea of wearing a troll-ear necklace (and also my players are filthy scavengers). However, it lends itself to the accumulation of multiple soft abilities. I swapped it out for the Trophy ability here, which is a much harder, more narrative ability.

Other Ability Types

Active/Passive: Arnold’s talked about this before. The distinction is pretty obvious, but it’s good to think about.

Backdoors: Abilities that let you change/ignore fundamental game mechanics. What is “fundamental” will change from hack to hack: travel time, rations, light, etc. can all be targets for backdoors in certain systems. These can be lots of fun to design, but handle them carefully.
- (Soft) Autotomy: You can sever your tail for a week’s worth of rations. It takes a year to grow back.
- (Hard) Searchlight: Your eyes emit light as hooded lanterns. You can’t turn this off.

Goal-Setting: Anything that guides players towards specific long-term goals. Caput Capre's GLΔG templates are this by default. Useful for players in need of thematic guidance. Best paired with another, more immediate ability.
- (Soft) Notches (Goblin Guts): Every X kills, you choose or invent a small mechanical bonus.
- (Hard) Lexi’s Legend-Smith: When you defeat a powerful, renowned enemy, you can write the weapon you used into legend. It becomes a magic weapon.

Meta-Fictional: Abilities that discusses the game structure beyond mechanics. Any ability that reads “once per session” or “once per adventure” is this by default. These lend a theatrical vibe to the game, which can be fun and/or immersion-breaking depending on what kind of player you are.
- (Soft) Breaker of Armies: You deal max damage to nameless mooks and dumb animals. (i’m sure this is from someone’s GLOG fighter but I can’t find it anymore)
- (Hard) Dramatic Entrance (Goblin Guts): Once per session, you can walk off-screen. At any time, you can declare you are re-entering the scene, ignoring plausibility.

Worldbuilding: Abilities that let players build the game world collaboratively with the DM. “I know a guy” is this. Spellbreeding, mad science, and magic item creation are too. Mostly hard, but there’s room for soft design.
- (Soft) Old Friends: In each new hex, you can declare an NPC to be an old friend/rival of yours. You have advantage against each other on all checks. (You know each other very well.)
- (Hard) Skerples' Obscure Knowledge: Once per session, you can declare something to be true because you read it in a book.

M(agic) D(ice): Anything based on the original GLOG’s casting system (or near-adjacent to it). Always appreciated because rolling dice is fun and I love building lil cube towers during downtime.
- (Soft) 5E Bard’s Inspiration Dice: Spend a d6 to add that much to an ally’s roll
- (Hard) Lexi's Jack & Contact Dice: Spend d6s to invent helpful NPCs.

Gonzalo Salles

I think I'm good on Joesky tax, but just in case:

(Δ) Immutable
Speak for 3 hours without pause to a crowd that goes on to do something transformative.
Your voice can carry up to 1 mile and can be heard over the sounds of falling water, metropolis, and war. You can’t be gagged or silenced by any means. You can’t be interrupted while giving a speech; if you would die, you don’t die until the speech is over.