Sagatafl FAQ

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Q: What is Sagatafl?
A: Sagatafl is first and foremost a character creation rules system, that is an objective set of procedures that a player can interact with, to make choices that together shape up to a coherent whole of a human (or otherwise) being, defined in terms of its inborn developmental potential, and its acquired abilities, with all choices having knowable consequences (all combinations of choices also have knowable consequences), and the resulting character being guaranteed (once playtesting is over) to not exceed the overall competence/goodness level one should except from the amount of Goodie Points that were allotted to the character creation process.

Mostly following logically from the character creation rules is a character advancement subsystem.

By necessity, since Sagatafl was never intended to output character sheets for use in other roleplaying gaming rules systems, Sagatafl also has its own subsystems for resolving actions, both physical and non-physical actions, and dealing as objctively as possible with the consequences thereoff.

Finally, because the primary use to which the chief designer intends to put Sagatafl is to run RPG campaigns in his Ärth historical fantasy setting, Sagatafl also has several magic systems, and rules for how they interact or fail to interact with each other.

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Q: What is Sagatafl about?
A: Sagatafl is about human variety, the ways in which Humans can differ from each other, and how different Humans have different potentials for change. Sagatafl not having a subject is good, because it means that once one is equipped with knowledge of human variety, one can think up a character independently of Sagatafl, and wait until the character is fully formed in one's mind before one goes to Sagatafl to see that yes indeed, Sagatafl facilities the creation of that character in vidid and highly individual detail.

Many other RPG systems are created to explore a very narrow subject and so by necessity require players to think up characters who conform to that subject, making system-independent character creation impossible. Or else they are designed for use in an extreme ideological fantasy in which humans have infinite capacity for change. Or both.

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Q: Does that mean that players have to create their characters wihthout looking at the rules?
A: Not at all. It is merely important to state clearly and frequently that it is possible to do so: To envision a highly detailed and defined four-dimensional individual human being, and then come to Sagatafl and find that the infrastructure required to express that individual in game-mechanical terms is present.

The vast majority of player characters, and all NPCs, will be created via a back-and-forth process of the player (or the GM, when creating an NPC) interacting with the rules, his choices influenced by the rules, and some of the time a character will be created built around one or two special and interesting traits, possibly traits that no other RPG system simulates well (if at all). Which is a perfectly valid way to create a character.

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Q: Long ago an experiment was conducted, testing Sagatafl (then named FFRE) against a pre-existing character creation, named Jill, created by Usenet poster Mary Kuhner. The experiment was to see if Sagatafl was sufficiently flexible to facilitate the creation and expression of this system-independent character. How did that experiment go? And where is the final result?
A: The experiment was severely marred by technical communications problems. This was back in the stone age of communication: Sagatafl existed as a series of documents in MS Word format, and Mary Kuhner had no ability whatsoever to read MS Word. There was no Open Office, using MS Word's built-in function to convert documents to HTML produced results that were horrible, verging on a crime against humanity, and in order to convert MS Word to PDF you needed extremely expensive software packages.

In spite of this, the experiment went very well, in that nothing Mary Kuhner wanted to express or define about the character Jill did not already exist within the Sagatafl character creation infrastructure, except one thing: The possiility that young characters (Jill was still in her teens) could develop mentally as they matured; that her Intelligence attribute could increase. This struck the chief designer as an excellent concept, and so this was added to Sagatafl's character creation rules, although the current form of those rules differs from the one employed back then (nowadays, developmentally immature characters have an RD penalty to the affected Attributes, e.g. Intelligence in Jill's case. That's much cleaner and more elegant, and more sensible to price, compared to the original implementation).

Since it was not possible to convert the resulting MS Word character sheet to a format that Mary Kuhner could read, except by devoting a dozen man-hours to typing it up in TXT format manually, Mary Kuhner never saw the character sheet, and so the experiment can reasonably be said to not have been completed. However, apart from severe technical communications problems, one must conclude that the experiment went well.

This is also an example of one of the ways in which Sagatafl develops, evolves and improves. The chief designer has a vivid imagination for coming up with unusual and interesting individuals, and since all NPCs must be creatable by the rules, such characters are an excellent test for the system, to see if it is flexible enough.

For instance an as-of-yet not fully named Ärth setting character (his byname is Wand-Elf, because he carries a staff and has strangely white hair) has a staff that, among other Enchantments, has the ability to change shape into a bow. Sagatafl already offered two Enchantments for objects to change shape, but one was cheap and easy and allowed only very subtle changes of shape, while the other one was expensive and difficult and allowed much more drastic changes in the object's shape than what was desired for this character (and it would also cost an unreasonable amount of Essence to get enough charges for the frequency of changes the character would want). Because of the invention and definition of this character, a third intermediate Enchantment was added to the system, which can affect an intermediate amount of change upon the item, such as changing from staff to bow and back again, and with this Enchantment having a moderate difficulty, and a reasonable cost in Essence for the number of charges the character would want to have.

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Q: So is Sagatafl open for new challenges of the Jill type? The claim that "you can create any character" with Sagatafl comes across as extreme, and it would be nice to see this claim challenged and upheld.
A: In theory yes, Sagatafl is open for such challenges. In practice, the system is incomplete, and so it is not particularly interesting to create full characters as of yet. Finally, the "you can create any character" claim must be clarified.

First of all, only characters from within human capabilitistic variety are guaranteed creatable. Secondly, the amount of simulation that goes on, the degree of interaction between inborn developmental potential and ability acquisition, is what is noteworthy about Sagatafl. A few other RPG rules systems also allows the creation of any character one can dream up, such as GURPS by Steve Jackson Games and Hero System by Hero Games (both of these systems also facilitate vastly better creation of characters from outside of human capabilistic variety, than does Sagatafl, although in order to achieve this they use a "build" elements system that means that the constructions require GM approval), but these systems hardly attempt to simulate character development before and after game start, and implicitly fail to discern between that which is inborn and that which is acquired.

Therefore, what could be of value to the design process currently is written sketches of characters, with unusual traits or four-dimentional developmental paths clearly marked out, accompanied by questions such as "Can Sagatafl do this?" Being able to say yes is valuable. Being able to say "No, but your sketch has prompted clear (or vague) plans to expand Sagatafl to be able to do this" is also valuable.

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Q: The other claim made about Sagatafl is that its character creation procedure is abuse-proof, and therefore does not require GM intervention. This makes no sense. Any RPG character creation system can be abused!
A: Other RPG systems with trait synergies have character creation systems that can be abused, because they were not carefully designed, and utilized an overly simplistic model of the individual human and of human change. This necessitates giving the GM the right to reject a filled-in character sheet for reasons other than world compliance, and that right is intolerable to the chief designer, as it impedes the process of creative flow that creating a player character ought to be.

Sagatafl claims that for any amount of Goodie Points, the basic currency of the character creation process, there is a ceiling of overall goodness, of desirability-as-a-PC from a generalized point of view, a point of view that has no specific agenda but to play an RPG, that cannot be exceeded. Thus abusive optimization cannot take place. If the players all create characters built on 120 GP, then the GM can know that no single character will have an overall ability to exert his will on the surrounding world, that is disproportionately greater than that of other efficiently created 120 GP characters.

It is quite possible to spend one's GoodiePoints in a less than sub-optimal fashion, and in fact the vast majority of PCs will not be created in an optimal fashion. They will, however, be fairly close to optimal, since Sagatafl can only be said to punish those character concepts that are self-contradictory, such as a character with low Agility and low Perception whom the player wans to have a very high Dodge skill.

Sagatafl gives each player the choice of where the character should fall on a spectrum ranging from a complete generalist with some ability at everything, over a semi-generalist or a broadly specialized character, to a character who is narrowly specialized in a single activity. This is good, and one must be mindful of the fact that there is nothing wrong with creating a specialized character. Any realistic world will be full of specialized characters, and specialization is in no way inherently abusive; it only becomes abusive if the character's overall ability to exert his will on the surrounding world is disproportionately greater than what one would expect from his GP value.

The two most common forms of "abuse" in non-abuse-proof character cretation systems, are the skill expert and the combat monster.

The combat monster, however, is often not an actual problem, but merely a perceived problem; a character that is perceived by the GM and/or by the other players to be a problem, even though in fact it is not. The problems arise from the campaign not taking place in a world - a place that has a social structure that responds realistically to violent threats and disruptions, and/or by the lack of competence on behalf of the GM in presenting a campaign in which one feature is that by virtue of natural emergence, only a subset of encountered problems can be efficiently solved by violent means.

The skill expert is a character who has unreasoanbe expertise in all or nearly all non-combat skills (or in some cases also in combat skills) - unreasonable out of proportion to the amount of character creation currency that the character was built on. This is a phenomenon that occurs only in a subset of RPG rules systems, and this is due to bad design decisions having been made, at the very core of those systems, thus making them infixable; to fix such a system, one would have to perform major surgery on it, almost to the point of taking it apart and re-assembling it in a different way.

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Q: So can I challenge Sagatafl in this way? Create a character, and argue in a calm and objective fashion that it is abusively good for its GP total?
A: Sure, provided you have access to all the necessary character creation rules. You don't have that currently, but once you get it, you're welcome. Just keep in mind that the definition of abuse employed has to be be objective and reasonable. "I don't like" is no good, and "this character is optimized" is downright stupid. If one does not optimize when one creates a character, then what one does it to not choose an area (broad of narrow) of specialization, and so the result is inevitably a generalist character.

Also, people who are interested in advance access to material are encouraged to subscribe to the mailing list, and to there request the necessary material once posts are made about it. E.g. the character creation spreadsheet.

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Q: Why does creating a character require a spreadsheet? Sagatafl must be a horribly complicated system, since one cannot create a character by hand.
A: Sagatafl character creation is not at all complicated. The character creation procedure is extremely transparent, and the reason a spreadsheet is required is because a huge number of simple arithmetical calculations are required. Each step along the way, as well as the overall consequence of the procedures, is eminently transparent and understanable. There is nothing arcane or unusual or surprising about any of it.

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Q: What will the character creation spreadsheet be like? Do I have to buy MS Office to make characters?
A: An old character creation spreadsheet already exists, and this largely shows what the final version of the new sheet will be like, with multiple pages, output in A4-paper formatted character sheet pages, and so forth, with the main additions being a fault-warning page with a list of warnings, error messages and cautions to the player, and if possible some more detailed information on physical actions (see next entry), including combat, pre-calculated on the sheet, based on the individual character.

The old spreadsheet is in MS Excel, however, and it has been decided to start over and make the new character creation spreadsheet in Open Office's Calc program, since this enables everyone to make characters without having to buy software. But, as said above, if you have access to the old spreadsheet, then the new one won't really be different in major ways.

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Q: If creating a character takes several hours, then Sagatafl must be horribly slow to play.
A: Sagatafl emphasizes fast at-table play, although without being willing to disrespect the capabilitistic individuality of each character, and the way to achieve that is to perform as many of the arithmetical calculations in advance of actual play, and have them present on the character sheet in ready-to-reference form (created by the character creation spreadsheet). In addition to this, a lot of other information is available pre-calculated in the form of lookup tables, such as the various Armour Penetration (PA) values for weapons based on attack Success.

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Q: Why have several roll mechanics? You got normal rolls, and Saving Throws, and Detailed Saves, and Coarse Rolls. And sometimes I have to roll 2d8-9 instead of rollin a variable number of twelve-siders.
A: Everything but combat damage rolls, and a few specialized table rolls and the 2d8-9 "Overcome Roll", are variants of the basic multiple-d12 roll mechanic, with the variation almost always being confied to how the roll is read, often by "grouping" several otherwise distinct outcomes into the same type of outcome.

For instance the Saving Throw is there because the basic roll mechanic produces outcomes that are far too detailed. When you roll to see, e.g., if a character resists a Spell cast on him, you don't really want to know how well he resisted it, or if he failed to resist, how much he failed. Normally you'd want a binary outcome, did he resist yes/no, but for Sagatafl it was found that having a trinary outcome was actually more desirable, so that the possible outcomes are Yes Did Resist, Resisted Partially, and Did Not Resist.

Detailed Saves are thus an in-between case, between the normal roll mechanic roll and a Saving Throw, where there is a certain greater effect if you resist very well, and another greater effect if you fail really badly at resisting. The Bad Detailed Save is the same as a Detailed Save, except that if you Succeed, the degree of Sccess does not matter, but it does matter if you Fumble badly. One example is rolling to see if Epilipsy triggers (do you get a normal epileptic fit, or a grand mal?); another is rolling to see if a Terminally Ill character dies or is merely bedridden for the Day.

Coarse Rolls are simply an application of the normal roll mechanic, where anything but extreme results are disregarded. If the outcome is in between a certain range, nothing whatsoever happens. Currently, its only use is in Complementary Skill Rolls, but other uses will probably crop up.

The 2d8-9 roll is intended to create an average result of zero, which is then modified by adding the strength of the attacking force and subtracting the strength of the resisting force. It is in principle similar to the Resistance Table Rolls found in certain other RPG systems, except that with the way the 2d8 mchanic is shaped, it makes more sense to refer to it as an OVercome Roll than as a Resistance Roll, since it "feels" as if it is the attacker who is doing the rolling. The 2d8 mechanic replaces an old variable-number-of-summed-six-siders mechanic, and is used in places where fairly precise balancing is required, for instance when a Cure Disease effect of a certain strength is trying to overcome a disease of a certain strength. The possible outcomes are Did Not Overcome, Partial Overcome, and Did Overcome, with the later - Did Overcome - sometimes being a question of degree. For instnance a Spell of Suppress Light will suppress a light source for a certain period of time, depending on how great the "Overcome Factor" was.

Magic system

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Q: The jargon pertaining to magic items is confusing. Sometimes it's called Enchanting, other times Endowing. What's going on?
A: This pertains specifically to permanent magical items. An Enchantment is a magical property of an item, usually permanent or else lasting for a fairly long time. Endowing is a learnable method of putting Enchantments into items, but there are other ways to put Enchantments into items than Endowing. One can use the term Enchanting about any process of rendering an item permanently (or semi-permanently) magical, but from a game-mechanical point of view, one must always know the method used, which can be Endowing or can be something else.

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Q: Spellcasting seems like it would be slow, with all those rolls to accumulate Progress. Is it really playable?
A: It was a concern of the chief designer initially, that peraps the Progress amount required to cast Spells were too high, not necessarily for 1st Level Spells (which require 2 points of Progress) but possibly the Progress progression escalated too rapidly (doubling every Spell Level). However, extensive analysis, in the form of literally millions of computer-generated dice rolls, showed that as long as the caster's Realm Skill level is reasonable relative to the Roll Diffculty of the Spellcasting attempt (keeping in mind that almost all Spellcasting is aided by a Focus item which lowers the RD), a Spell can usually be completed in a number of cycles that does not exceed its Spell Level by much. For instance casting a 5th Level Spell, a very powerful and thus dramatic magical endavour, will almost always be completed in 6-8 cycles.

More desperate casting attempts, where the RD is higher relative to the caster's Realm Skill level, create a process where the caster frequently gets a Minor Fumble and thus loses his Progress and must start over. That's a precarious process, because with the higher RD the risk of all kinds of Fumbles is much higher, including Abortive Fumbles (F-3 and worse), and the general advice to spellcaster characters is to not attempt these castings except in circumstnaces of dire need. Which, not incidentally, is the outcome that was desired from the get go, since the primary brake on Spellcasting is the character's fear of Fumbling.

Spell attacks, primarily the various Bolt Spells, Fire Bolt I, Fire Bolt II, Lighting Bolts and Ice Bolts, will also be attempted balanced in such a way that their Range Increment and damage output is reasonable in light of the fact that they take an average of several Rounds to cast each (and several more rounds for the Grade II versions) but can be cast many times before the caster runs out of Spell Energy Points. In short, they must be better than bows and similar weapons, although part of that benefit should reside in the psychological simulation performed by the GM (with some aid of various rules), in that attack Spells are intrinsically scarier than being attacked by mundane weapons.

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Q: Where are the rules for creating non-permanent magic items, such as potions and scrolls?
A: Such ruless have proven difficult to create. The nice thing about the Essence system for permanent magic (including but not limited to permanent items) is that it acts as a "brake" on the entire world, not just on those very few world denizens who are player characters.

It has so far not been possible to device a functional rules shape that produce a brake effect acting upon NPCs as well as on PCs. One can of course disregard that problem, and just propose a couple of Skills called something like Potion Brewing and Scroll Scribing, and simple rules for how they are used, and for what they can produce, but that is not a priority at all, since such items are largely undesirable in the Ärth setting, as NPCs would realistically mass-produce and stockpile them (as should PCs) which would serve to thoroughly de-medievalize the setting.

One simple model for both potions and scrolls is to take inspiration from Quest FRP v2.1, where scrolls simply reproduce Spells, and where potions reproduce only those Spells that have an internal effect, so that e.g. one cannot have a Potion of Fire Bolt II.

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Sagatafl and other RPG systems

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