Skills and the Hunt in Deathblow

 I think the most challenging aspect of design for my hypothetical Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG Deathblow is figuring out how to do The Hunt.

The intent for Deathblow is that hunting the monsters should feel as exciting and engaging as fighting the monster. While the final fight ought to feel epic and climactic, the sort of "detective work" that constitutes The Hunt needs to feel engaging as a piece of mechanically rich gameplay, but without being so heavy-handed that it crowds out roleplay opportunities.

In 5E, non-combat gameplay engages primarily in the Ability Check mechanic - a very simple mechanic in which players attempting to do various things get a success or a failure based on their total roll and the difficulty class the DM chooses. There are other systems that can be engaged: spellcasters can often have spells that function best out of combat, and using them can create an interesting tension between the desired utility of a non-combat spell with the sacrifice of that spell slot's use in combat. I think Ability Checks, though, remain the primary way that the Exploration and Social pillars of the game are executed, mechanically (though I think the 5.5 redesign tried to grant out-of-combat features to non-spellcasters that sometimes involve the same trade-off, like a Barbarian using Rage to enhance various skills and use Strength with them instead of their normal ability modifiers).

Spending resources in order to use character abilities is one of the most popular ways of making engaging gameplay - by limiting an action, and potentially other actions by expending a more universal resource, to a certain number of uses per adventure/day/whatever, the player is forced to think strategically about when to use that ability so that it has the greatest impact on their potential success.

At the same time, though, I think a good system needs some unlimited character abilities. If everything is limited, using up all of your resources means you start to also lose some of your identity as a character. If I have the Mage Hand cantrip on a Wizard in D&D, I might have blown through all my spell slots, but I can still do something that feels wizardly and magical.

Currently, the idea that I find really fascinating and would love to move forward with if it could work is that The Hunt, as I'm calling the non-combat part of an adventure in which you seek out the monster, is where you generate your resources to then use in combat.

I think it makes a certain thematic sense - the more you can learn about the monster's habits, history, and nature, the better prepared you'll be when you confront it, and this would reward a thorough hunt with greater power to bring against it.

    So, let's lay down how we imagine The Hunt working on a broad level:

An adventure begins with the Night Hunters (our PCs) called in to deal with a deadly monster. They arrive at the adventure location - which would probably most classically be some rural hamlet out in a dark wood, but could be an aristocrat's manor house, an urban slum, or some work camp like a quarry or a mine - and begin to look for signs of the monster.

The Night Hunters have a couple of goals they can work toward in their Hunt. Right now, I have it broken down into just two categories: Track and Identify.

Tracking the monster is all about finding its location. While the monster might be on the move (it is, after all, preying upon the people in the area) it ought to have a resting place somewhere in the area, like a vampire's hidden coffin in which they rest during the day (note that in this game, we're going with Dracula-style vampires, who don't burst into flame with the sun, but just lose some of their abilities - definitely easier to kill them in the day, but not so simple as ripping the curtains down).

Identify would be to figure out what kind of monster it is. The idea would be that the people being preyed upon only know that people are going missing or bodies are piling up, and there would likely be some confusion over what kind of monster it is - I like the idea of a False Vampire (I think it's a minion type for Draw Steel's summoner) that, in this game, would probably be a more Lovecraftian alien than a classic undead blood-sucker, but might leave victims exsanguinated and thus confuse those investigating.

Collecting clues of these categories (and others if I can think of them) would grant certain benefits to the party - indeed, I imagined that we could note on a stat block what information getting a certain proportion of the Identify Clues would give the party, literally spelling out that they have, say, resistance to fire damage. One of the key things Identify could help with is if the monster has special Deathblow requirements, like using a silver weapon to kill a werewolf.

Each monster would, in its stat block, show how many of each clues you're supposed to seed in a adventure, and then have a list of suggestions of what the nature of the clues might be.

The intent here is that the GM who wants to run a Deathblow adventure would pick out a monster they find interesting (and level-appropriate for the party) and from the monster entry get some suggestions on where such a monster might operate, what its lair might be like, and then that list of clues to seed. The GM then builds an adventure location that can fit all those things, and ideally this makes it pretty easy to feel like you've got the adventure sorted out.

    But let's return to a focus on the players:

The clues can't just be like objects to collect off the ground like you're in an N64-era Rareware platform game. While they have a clear and precise mechanical meaning, the clues should still feel situated in the world and as part of an unfolding narrative.

For example, if your monster is a powerful ghost (we'd probably have a variety of ghost-like monsters - we'll say a Specter is a level 1 or 2 threat. Remember that we're probably looking at a level cap of 5). Maybe the kind of ghost it is leaves ectoplasm as a residue in places where it has appeared.

If it's just some weird goo, it feels like we might be able to identify it with a quick skill check - something that in D&D would probably be an Arcana check (or Religion, as that's officially the knowledge skill related to Undead). But I think we're looking for something more compelling.

Let's imagine that there is an Ectoplasm clue to find, but in the world of our game, that stuff isn't immediately obvious - maybe instead of dripping clear jelly, it's an invisible residue, and so you need a Mechanist with a Residue Identifier ability or an Occultist with a Read the Signs ability, each of which might do somewhat different things but can both secure this clue.

I think these abilities need to be somewhat broadly designed: the joy of a TTRPG as opposed to a digital game is that you can be flexible and tailor the experience to the players. Indeed, I think that my Mechanist ability in the previous paragraph is a little too specific - you'd only use that to get precisely this clue.

Read the Signs, though, as an Occultist ability, has more potential: Let's say that the ability lets you detect the presence of supernatural activity. The ability just gives a Yes or No binary response, but the supernatural energies could be anything from ectoplasm to demonic energies to alien spatial warping.

What this would then open up is a roll-based check to determine what kind of "Signs" the ability detects. If our Occultist rolls well on their Investigation, they might find that, yes, this is specifically ectoplasm and therefore we're dealing with an incorporeal undead spirit. That, then, might give us an Identify Point.

Now, do we have multiple resources?

In Diablo III, the Demon Hunter class (which truly fits a "classic Night Hunter" aesthetic, and might be a major inspiration for our Hunter class) has two resources, Hatred and Discipline, other than the other classes that only use one. Generally, Hatred is the shorter-term resource used for damaging abilities, which comes and goes at a fast rate. Discipline, then, is more for utility abilities and I don't think there are any abilities that generate it - you just need to let it regenerate over time.

I think we could take a similar approach. While I like the idea of each class having its own resource name, we could probably get away with just giving them all the same resources. But the dual-resource system could help us figure out how to do the Hunt versus Combat.

Perhaps players begin an adventure with full Discipline (which I think is a reasonable name for the more utility-focused resource) but an empty tank for Wrath (ooh, yeah, I like that). Discipline can be spent on abilities like the Occultist's Read the Signs, and the expectation is that you're going to largely be spending it on non-combat abilities.

Each time you successfully discover a clue (so, for instance, our Occultist uses Read the Signs and then succeeds on their Investigation roll to determine that there's Ectoplasm) you gain some Wrath. Maybe it's just one, or maybe each clue counts for 3 Wrath (we'd need to figure out how many clues that we're expecting you to find before you face the monster).

Now, two things, I think, ought to be true:

First is that you should be able to discover some Clues with clever thinking or lucky rolls without spending Discipline. Let's say that the party's Warrior finds a fellow veteran in town, buys them a round of drinks, and through effective RP and some good Persuasion checks (currently I'm just using 5E skills as examples - we'll get to that) discovers that there's a rumor that the kindly old lady living at the top of the hill actually killed her abusive husband when she was younger, and that the community has just agreed not to speak of it because they all agreed she was in the right and didn't want the authorities to punish her for it. That could be a major clue to the location (Tracking) and type (Identify) of ghost we're dealing with, even if the Warrior didn't expend any resources to get it. Just a great boon for the party.

The other is that using an ability shouldn't always automatically net you that clue. The party's Hunter might have heard some stories about livestock going missing and choose to use some ability, maybe "Listen to the Wild," to figure out if some monster was snatching chickens, but then finds that it was a mundane fox and unrelated to the monstrous killings.

Now, what the rewards for these successes should be is a little up in the air: I like the idea of identifying the monster being something the whole party is rewarded for. I'm tempted to say that only the character who discovers a clue gains Wrath (maybe a player using an ability to assist them gains some Wrath as well). But horror thrives on isolation, and I think giving the party an incentive to split up is actually really good for us (even if, as GM, you'll want to be sure not to linger too long on any given scene to ensure that the players feel that they're getting an equal share of the spotlight).

I honestly think that skills might work pretty similarly to D&D. While I'd want to use modifiers rather than D&D's archaic score-versus-modifier thing, I think the fundamental idea that we have a modifier that combines something with our basic stats and try to hit a target number works. I might go for more of a 3.5 idea in which we get a certain number of skill ranks to invest in particular skills each level so that players can specialize a little more (and overcome low stats - maybe our Assassin doesn't read a lot of books, and has a low Knowledge stat, but they're very good at reading a scene, and have a lot of ranks in Investigation). (Also, thinking of changing the Assassin class name. Cuthroat? Outlaw? Nothing final yet).

A lot of creative work needs to go into figuring out what Hunt abilities each class would get. As I see it, each class should get the same number of them (and the same number of combat abilities,) and I imagine that at level 1, we're probably coming in with, like, two or three. Each would be thematic to the class fantasy - the Hunter is going to use non-magical tracking abilities, maybe they can set a trap (something that could potentially create bonus clues?). Meanwhile, the Witch or Occultist is going to have stuff that's more like magical spells, speaking to the dead or viewing things that happened in the past (the sort of thing in the latter case that might yield an opportunity for a perception check).

I think when it comes to skills, the Monster should determine target numbers for it. As I see it, clues would come in various difficulties, with each monster requiring a number of easy, moderate, and difficult clues to find, and the monster would set the difficulties for each of those types of clues.

Ideally, the monster would leave only a little work to the GMs - to come up with a setting and NPCs, and then just make sure there's room to place all the clues in their environment.

Next thing I want to talk about is the duration of the Hunt, and potential early encounters.