Last time we talked about DragonRune, we discussed the general 2d10 action resolution system as well as the initial frustrations with previous designs that led to DragonRune’s existence in the first place. This time around I want to discuss the various types of status tracking in the game and how they developed.

To HP or not to HP…

In the initial draft for the system I was leaning heavily into my inspiration from The One Ring (easily the best modern RPG system, in my honest opinion), choosing to represent a hero’s physical well-being on two levels: first as their Endurance, which was reduced by their Encumbrance and Fatigue, and secondly as a binary Wounded/Healthy state that modified rolls and other features of the game.

This worked well enough, but I really disliked adding a secondary roll to confirm Wounds (as we talked about last time, trying to remove as many rolls as possible). This was especially true with those extra rolls being related to the armor instead of the hero’s stats. It was clunky and I found it a bit hard to make work in a modern or sci-fi setting (or with magic, for that matter). Initial playtests bore these misgivings out, so I started thinking about other possibilities.

Since I already knew I was working with hit-locations, which previously only acted as multipliers for Endurance damage (which also made the system more math heavy), I wanted something to dovetail with that more directly. I was reading through RuneQuest at the time, and I starting thinking about a system in which the heroes had HP but it was based purely the hit-location. I really didn’t like the way RQ did it, however, as it was clunky with an overall HP in addition to hit-location specific HP just feeling needlessly complex. The idea stuck in the back of my mind, however, and I played around with the concept for a few months in the background.

Inspiration struck when I finally got around to skimming Dominion Rules (which I was introduced to by Trevor Devall on the Me, Myself, and Die! YouTube channel). Instead of HP, Dominion Rules tracks physical damage directly via action penalties equal to the “damage” dealt. Characters in Dominion Rules have a five point “buffer” before the penalties start kicking in, but, because I was doing hit-locations (which Dominion Rules does not have) I reasoned that the penalties being spread across the various parts of the body would even things out a bit.

So far in my playtests this has been accurate, however, my group is pretty adverse to combat, so they have been very adept at finding ways around it whenever possible. I’m still testing it out, but signs are good that this is a good direction. It helps the ruleset stand out with a unique system while also unifying some gameplay elements (namely hit-locations and damage) so that everything flows together logically. In fact, I’ve found that the players have intuitively grasped the idea of penalties-as-damage and they’ve liked the combination of quick, lethal battles with the tactical nuance and grounded feel of the action economy.

Resolve, Fatigue, and Stress

Having changed the design considerably, however, I still needed to find a way to apply Fatigue (and Encumbrance) that felt as simple and effective as that in The One Ring. I kicked around several ideas, such as making them penalties to Athletics, but at that time I was still counting Encumbrance for every single item, and this was simply a punishing system.

While I was pondering over this conundrum, I was also playing around with Resolve. Closely related to Magic Points in RuneQuest, Willpower in Dragonbane, and Hope in The One Ring, Resolve is a small pool of points that heroes can use to cast spells, activate advantages, and offset bad rolls. This pool has been based on Willpower in some form since the beginning of the design, but at that stage in development it was, like Endurance, made up of a combination of multiple Attributes. This gave the players an enormous pool of Resolve to draw from which was quite frankly ruining the whole concept.

Taking a cue from Endurance, however, I added in a Stress mechanic specifically to enable playing Call of Cthulhu modules and the like. It acted on the hero’s Resolve like Fatigue did with Endurance, but, in a nod to Mothership, it could only be recovered through stress-relieving activities. Now that I’d gotten rid of Endurance, maybe I could shift Fatigue over to Resolve as well? After all, Stress would only be appropriate in more horror themed games which would typically have much less impact from Fatigue (being primarily tied to travelling on foot in the wilderness), so it would be unlikely to double-up very often.

The more I toyed with the idea the more I liked it, especially as I had already decided I really didn’t want to track even abstract Encumbrance on every single possible item. During recent playtests this has worked out well, so this is likely the final result, with Fatigue and Encumbrance giving penalties to certain Skills but also depressing the hero’s Resolve pool. This has the added advantage of very elegantly giving rise to mages wishing to reduce the amount of armor they wear in order to keep as much Resolve on hand for casting as possible. Win-Win.

Hindrances

The final piece of the puzzle is an idea that I’ve loved since I first encountered it in The Black Hack, which is a small, concise, but robust series of status effects that the GM can draw on to define the effects of spells or special creature attacks. These are classics like Blinded, Deafened, or Confused, but also include things like Exhausted, Disarmed, or Prone. All told, the list and its related mechanics take up less than a column of page space, but I find something like this so integral to lacing together a smoothly running, lightweight battle system that I have included it in everything I’ve made in the last decade or so, and ported it into pre-existing systems, too.

The key to making Hindrances work is the fact that recovering from them depends on the situation in the narrative. Is the hero Blinded because the thief threw sand in their eyes? Well, that can be recovered by simply taking an action to wipe their eyes. Maybe the hero is blinded because they physically lost an eye due to an attack, or maybe they were cursed by an ancient idol. In these scenarios the group will need access to powerful magic (or technology, depending on the setting), which could set up several sessions worth of adventures as the group seeks that cure. In either situation, however, the core mechanic is the same (-8 on vision-based Perception, in case you are wondering) allowing the GM to easily reuse these effects over and over while being simple enough (usually one sentence) so they can be quickly referenced or put on the GM screen.

Conclusion

This state of the design has been in place now since the middle of the summer (2024, for readers from the future) and its held up time and time again in playtests. I really would like to have a knock-down, drag-out battle sequence to try and really dial in on the lethality, but the fact that we’ve had a good time across multiple sessions of RuneQuest as well as other one-shots is probably a testament to how effective it is when put in the hands of players who are cautious planners seeking to maximize their advantages.

The only possible changes that I can see cropping up in the future are numeric, such as adjustments to the damage bonus from weapons, damage resistance from armor, or possibly the addition of some sort of wound buffer like in Dominion Rules. I may just include that last one as an optional rule for more epic heroes, however.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please check out the playtest document over on itch.io.