Best developed models (subsystems) other than combat

[NichG]

I find when I go to design homebrew or a new system, my thought process is very much conditioned on the sorts of things needed for a model of how combat will work. So e.g. when I think of attributes, I think damage, range, area of effect first and foremost, maybe movement or 'how many actions per round' sorts of questions, all of which fall into the combat model. I want some good inspiration to knock loose that habit.

So, what are the best non-combat subsystems people have seen in different games? Things which are rich and detailed *like* combat tends to be, but which aren't fundamentally about combat. Bonus points for systems which aren't even about opposed forces! For example, crafting systems (which aren't about making weapons and armor), building/architectural systems (headquarters, outposts, cities, countries?), social systems that aren't just about persuasion or direct manipulation, economics and trade, wilderness exploration and survival (anything like Oregon Trail in the TTRPG space?), cooking/chefery, art, scientific research, terraforming/landscaping, etc?

How do these systems compare with regards to having well-defined challenges, creating their own internal motivations, and 'feeling like you're actually doing the thing' from the player perspective (e.g. how they manage to support the fantasy of being a professional chef or professional architect or whatever)?

[Telok]

Classic Traveller, and probably just about every other version of it, has a reasonable trading system. Shouldn't be too hard to hack into a fantasy caravan or age of sail shipping system. If I remember correctly (afb) the CT Vagyr and book has a system for social standing for that species because they're non-human and their leadership positioning is, well, non-human. Mechwarrior has a system for running a mercenary mecha company. Gamma World, the good version, has a "figure out what this pre-apocalypse lost-tech thingy does" system based on a flowchart with some rolls at decision points.

The CT trade system fits quite well for the intended function of allowing a small trade ship working secondary routes to generally break even and probably keep up with maintence most of the time. The whole point being that you're both able to hex-crawl a new sector of space and to push the PCs into adventures because they need a few hundred thousand credits to fix or finance something. Gamma World did give a reasonable feel of playing around with weird stuff your character doesn't understand.

[Cactus]

Ars Magica has not only the best spellcasting rules but an extensive system for magical research and for crafting magic items.

[Meltheim]

D&D 4e skill challenges, especially using Lord Kensington's rules.

The Lord Kensington Rules for Skill Challenges are:

ROLL INITIATIVE!

Accrue a number of successes equal to party members +3 to win
Accrue 3 failures to lose
You can’t roll the same skill twice in a row.
You can’t roll the same skill someone immediately preceding you in initiative just rolled.
Allow creative uses of skills, but not uses that horn in on other skills.
Final decision as to whether a description of a skill works (and whether a roll can be attempted at all) lies with the GM.

[Psyren]

D&D 4e skill challenges, especially using Lord Kensington's rules.

The Lord Kensington Rules for Skill Challenges are:

ROLL INITIATIVE!

Accrue a number of successes equal to party members +3 to win
Accrue 3 failures to lose
You can’t roll the same skill twice in a row.
You can’t roll the same skill someone immediately preceding you in initiative just rolled.
Allow creative uses of skills, but not uses that horn in on other skills.
Final decision as to whether a description of a skill works (and whether a roll can be attempted at all) lies with the GM.


Wait, so the more allies you have the harder skill challenges become? Shouldn't it be the reverse?

[NichG]

Ars Magica has not only the best spellcasting rules but an extensive system for magical research and for crafting magic items.

What makes the lab and crafting system feel that way? Is it because things like generating vis, opening an object to enchantment, etc are separate steps? Is it because of how arcane connections encourage thinking in terms of expanding what you can target?

[stoutstien]

Wait, so the more allies you have the harder skill challenges become? Shouldn't it be the reverse?

There is a lot of insanity in 4e's approach to skills in an attempt to make it fit the rest of the system.

[Anonymouswizard]

Honestly IME it's less common for games to have subsystems as developed as your Standard Combat Engine (although as others have mentioned it's not non-existent) as it is for them to pull combat into the same level of abstraction as other activities. Slice of life games will generally add some kind of relationship and/or character arc system, but they rarely have the same level of detail.

The most common other subsystem I see is some kind of crafting or project system, where you track progress and refinements to doing A Thing over the course of several 'adventures', often combined with some kind of Downtime system. But in my experience these are pretty generic and broad, you pick A Thing, track your progress towards it, and then you do or have The Thing.

IMO this is because indie RPGs have mostly stepped away from the hobby's wargaming roots and decided they don't need such specific structures. On the other hand such detailed and specific structures aren't bad, if D&D dropped tactical combat you can be certain the indie community will pick it up pretty quickly, it's just that the current trend is more fairly broad systems tailored toward specific concepts (Forged in the Dark began with essentially two heist games but is now being used for other episodic story models).

As a side note I think the most detailed story emulation system I've seen is in Chronicles of Darkness, and it's going to be very YMMV (it turns a lot of stuff into explicit conditions that give XP if resolved in the 'right' way).

[lesser_minion]

"Social combat" systems for resolving debates are quite common, but generally they're handled as variations on the basic combat system. In Ars Magica, it's very similar to the ritual psychic duels you can engage in, with your debating stats changing depending on your approach and victory being achieved by exhausting your opponent. Burning Wheel likewise uses one of its crazy rock-paper-scissors subsystems to handle debates.

Ars Magica also has an extensive system for lab activities which feeds into a crazy amount of other stuff in the supplements. Damn near anything that happens in an Ars Magica module can be -- and is -- almost completely explained in terms of rules that anyone could potentially use, and many of the rules themselves aren't even new.

[Thane of Fife]

Some examples:

Classic Deadlands has, as I recall, a mini-subsystem for gambling and doing magic (in-setting, magic is performed by gambling with evil spirits). My recollection is that you basically get to draw more cards based on how good your roll is, and then have to put together the best poker hand you can, aiming to beat either your opponent or some target value.

Fantasy Wargaming has a very neat magic system based on a system of correspondences, where having the right conditions lined up gives you a sizable bonus on your magic rolls. So if you want to cast a spell governed by the sign of Aries, maybe you want to do it between 8 and 9 on a Saturday in May, while surrounded by 5 people and holding a wand made out of goat bone and cobalt (just making stuff up - I don't remember the actual correspondences). I think this touches on creating magical items, as well.

FW also has an interesting religious system. You gain piety points through good deeds and through not doing evil ones, and can use these points to appeal to various supernatural entities to work miracles or even to appeal to other entities higher up the chain on your behalf. These could probably be fairly easily reworked into a system based on a more earthly hierarchy, too.

I am told that the old James Bond RPG had a great chase system, but I'm not personally familiar with it.

Monsterhearts and Hellcats & Hockeysticks both have social systems with some detail. Monsterhearts has a focus on emotional manipulation where you try to gain strings on people and can later pull those strings to try to make them do what you want, and H&H has a system for how much psychological warfare you need to break someone's spirits (like, if you were trying to get the evil real estate developer to give up on turning your orphanage into a shopping mall, how many pranks do you need to pull). Not sure if either of these fall into what you're looking for.

[Anonymouswizard]

"Social combat" systems for resolving debates are quite common, but generally they're handled as variations on the basic combat system. In Ars Magica, it's very similar to the ritual psychic duels you can engage in, with your debating stats changing depending on your approach and victory being achieved by exhausting your opponent. Burning Wheel likewise uses one of its crazy rock-paper-scissors subsystems to handle debates.

Honestly the most interesting things to bring up about Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits is that 1) it's specifically for debates (so you're trying to convince a third party) and 2) it's designed to force concession and compromise over victory. But Burning Wheel is sadly a very interesting game that I'll likely never play.

While we're on Burning Wheel can I please gush about it's character creation and advancement? It's got a beautifully detailed Life path system that'll generally produce characters over blocks of stats, points of no return for certain races (I really want to play a elf who fell onto the Path of Spite at a young age and the attached tragedy), and the wonderful idea of charging for character flaws that made me want that damn missing arm. Then advancement is a detailed system of tracking both skill rolls and the metacurrency you spent on them to advance skill value (how many dice you roll) and skill shade (the target number on the dice). It's honestly as complex and enjoyable as most games' combat systems, especially burning new characters where you get to play around with the Lifepaths.

Burning Wheel basically restored my faith in crunchy systems simply by being something enjoyably different. Yes it has a fairly deep combat system, but that's not all that it is.

[Cactus]

What makes the lab and crafting system feel that way? Is it because things like generating vis, opening an object to enchantment, etc are separate steps? Is it because of how arcane connections encourage thinking in terms of expanding what you can target?

For me it's the level of detail, particularly the arcane connections. Your lab's location, facilities, ingredients and your character's knowledge can all influence what you can do. With magical effects being essentially a points-buy system the benefits include new options and not just increased chances of success. Provided it falls within the rather broad rules of Hermetic magic, whatever creation you think of the system can model it and tell you a 'cost', and there are many levers to pull that give opportunities for optimising or rewards for clever applications. I find it a very fun system to play with.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Exalted 3e's social influence system is a masterpiece, in my opinion. Simple enough to easily understand, deep enough to hook in plenty of feats and powers, and dovetails beautifully with character values.

The whole thing revolves around Intimacies, which are sort of like Aspects in Fate-- the things, people, and principles that are important to your character--except they come in three tiers of importance ("I'd mess up my life for this," "I'd risk my life for this," and "I'd sacrifice my life for this.") Any kind of significant persuasion requires you to cite supporting Intimacies of your target; the more significant the request, the more important an intimacy you need to cite.

Intimacies can also be cited defensively, to help resist social influence. You can make checks to raise or lower Intimacies in importance, a process which ALSO requires you to cite supporting Intimacies.

Which means that, in practice, most social maneuvering revolves around discovering what's important to your target, then working out how to exploit or manipulate them.

[NichG]

Some examples:

Classic Deadlands has, as I recall, a mini-subsystem for gambling and doing magic (in-setting, magic is performed by gambling with evil spirits). My recollection is that you basically get to draw more cards based on how good your roll is, and then have to put together the best poker hand you can, aiming to beat either your opponent or some target value.

Fantasy Wargaming has a very neat magic system based on a system of correspondences, where having the right conditions lined up gives you a sizable bonus on your magic rolls. So if you want to cast a spell governed by the sign of Aries, maybe you want to do it between 8 and 9 on a Saturday in May, while surrounded by 5 people and holding a wand made out of goat bone and cobalt (just making stuff up - I don't remember the actual correspondences). I think this touches on creating magical items, as well.

FW also has an interesting religious system. You gain piety points through good deeds and through not doing evil ones, and can use these points to appeal to various supernatural entities to work miracles or even to appeal to other entities higher up the chain on your behalf. These could probably be fairly easily reworked into a system based on a more earthly hierarchy, too.

I am told that the old James Bond RPG had a great chase system, but I'm not personally familiar with it.

Monsterhearts and Hellcats & Hockeysticks both have social systems with some detail. Monsterhearts has a focus on emotional manipulation where you try to gain strings on people and can later pull those strings to try to make them do what you want, and H&H has a system for how much psychological warfare you need to break someone's spirits (like, if you were trying to get the evil real estate developer to give up on turning your orphanage into a shopping mall, how many pranks do you need to pull). Not sure if either of these fall into what you're looking for.

Monsterhearts in particular seems like going in the direction I'm thinking (though I don't know the mechanics enough to say), since it sounds like would have you maneuvering around to get different strings in different ways, and that might mean that e.g. different characters would be collectively suited towards getting strings on a specific target due to their pre-existing relationships, style of approach, etc. So of those games, that sounds the most like you could have something like a 'party' with different roles towards different kinds of manipulations (even if I guess that sort of structured goal-driven thing is not what Monsterhearts is trying to be about).

I'm less looking for complicated ways to replace a dice roll (e.g. poker hands, chains of multiple rolls, etc) unless by becoming complex in that way it introduces more legible ways to read the state of the scenario and manipulate it other than just sprinting directly at the goal. So for instance, an unholy combination of Ars Magica laboratory stuff and the idea of deckbuilders would be a variant of Ars Magica where the maga has a 'hand' at any given time which, say, consists of Forms, Techniques, and Opportunities. Then Lab Actions and other various interactions with the world would allow the maga to use combinations of the cards they have or draw new cards - but those acts also consume cards if you want to do them with a high degree of success, or something like that. But on top of that you could have things like certain enchanted items or lab features allowing you a guaranteed swap of a card for a specific Form or Technique, or expand your hand size, or things like that. It's a bit too abstract to be good I think - Ars Magica's strong point seems to be a strongly internally coherent system with predictable causality and 'I can't cast Creo Ignem because I drew Auram and discarded Ignam while I was Cleaning Out the Cupboards last season' would be very forced when joined with the in-setting fiction. But that is at least an example of something in which there would be 'position' (your hand state) and 'context' (the currently available things to manipulate your hand state) and so on... I suppose I'm putting a pretty high value on the system feeling very natural given people's internal metaphors for the activity - e.g. without reading the rules of some new game, there are just things we 'get' about how people build combat systems because we've encountered dozens to hundreds of them and so have the designers. So its like, what's a good process for bringing in more fundamental metaphors where there isn't that history to give pop-culture awareness of ideas like hitpoints and so on even when those things look nothing like reality?

Maybe heist games have the level of resolution (pixels, not 'deciding things') I'm thinking of? Things like Ocean's Number and Leverage have created popular culture around a fairly wide set of roles, and I guess having a bunch of different roles surrounding the common activity helps people break it down more into different ways that it can be approached and how those ways support each-other through manipulating the scenario. So e.g. Masterminds who can figure out what others will do, information brokers who find the details needed to plan successfully, Hackers and Hitters and Grifters and Thieves and so on. Not saying that a game has to be class-based to have a complex subsystem, but maybe its easier to think about how a subsystem can be resolved down to a complex level when you already have an idea about multiple archetypes having distinctly defined roles to play.

[lesser_minion]

Wait, so the more allies you have the harder skill challenges become? Shouldn't it be the reverse?

It's meant to be "a skill challenge appropriate for N people", rather than one that magically becomes easier or harder based on how many people you actually have. 4e is notoriously bad at explaining this, however.

[KorvinStarmast]

Star Trek RPG's task system applies to most conflict resolution, with combat having some damage issues that have to be tacked on to it. It works well enough; the whole system is roll under.

[Telok]

It's meant to be "a skill challenge appropriate for N people", rather than one that magically becomes easier or harder based on how many people you actually have. 4e is notoriously bad at explaining this, however.

Except that as presented in the post its N+3 successes before 3 failures. With the static failure number it becomes more likely the party fails the challenge before succeeding. That's ok, one of their first versions got easier the "harder" it was supposed to be because the number of allowed failures scaled faster than the number of successes.

[Kapow]

The Dark Eye (at least the last version I played) has a detailed summoning and (magic) item crafting system.
afb, so for example skills matter (drawing can be used for summoning circle, astrology to get the best time, ...)
the whole skill system for non-combat skills has more depth (roll under 3 attributes, use skill points if you roll over, all skill points left determine grade of success)

[Anonymouswizard]

The Dark Eye (at least the last version I played) has a detailed summoning and (magic) item crafting system.
afb, so for example skills matter (drawing can be used for summoning circle, astrology to get the best time, ...)
the whole skill system for non-combat skills has more depth (roll under 3 attributes, use skill points if you roll over, all skill points left determine grade of success)

I once made a joke about DSA having rules for what happens if you don't sharpen your sword, and I'm still not certain if 'it did in previous editions' was continuing the joke or not

[NichG]

Hm, let me give a shot at a 'game based on research', since that one does seem to come up as promising in a few places (lab rules, etc).


This game is for playing out situations like the outbreak of a new disease, an alien invasion, some dangerous (or promising) new global phenomenon, etc. The scale of the scenarios should be such that its less about individually going and resolving things by hand, and more about creating the tools for millions of other people to deploy to resolve the tension. Not all research in this game has to be on a timer, but a lot of things won't matter as much unless there is *some* overarching urgency on the scale of months or a few years, which can be resolved through research and subsequent engineering or development.

Research is organized into Projects, which each center around a graph of linked phenomena - this is a set of things which share a common root cause, but which can themselves have downstream effects and so on.

For example, perhaps the initiating event is that people start to die off in the highest altitude villages on Earth. That would be a single Phenomenon, a node in the causal graph. Upstream of that node could be, for example, the Phenomenon that odd genetic changes have happened across humanity within a short period of time. Downstream of the genetic changes could be other localized consequences of those changes (each its own Phenomenon), and upstream might be e.g. 'an alien probability manipulation engine in Antarctica has turned on, and is adjusting microscopic random events to bring about a specific future event' (which would have other downstream nodes as well, like odd winning streaks in casinos in South America, etc.

The Project starts from a particular node on the graph, but characters don't know if that's a leaf node or a root node or what. By gathering evidence about a Phenomenon, characters can uncover linked nodes, with the goal of (ostensibly) uncovering a node they can actually do something about. Evidence takes the form of Data, Samples, and Experiments, each of which require interacting with the Phenomenon in distinct ways. Different sources of Evidence have Quality levels (1, 2, or 3) and keywords that describe in more detail the type of evidence it is (Genetic, Behavioral, Material, etc) and which determine which skills and equipment apply to processing that evidence.

- Samples are generally fast but personally risky. People need to go into the field, encounter the Phenomenon directly, etc. A Low Quality (Lv1) sample could be collecting blood from random people living at altitude; a Medium Quality (Lv2) sample could be finding someone who is in the process of dying of the ailment and being able to monitor their progress directly. A High Quality (Lv3) sample might be finding someone who appears to be immune when the rest of their family were infected. The more specific the Sample is to the core of the Phenomenon, the higher the Quality. Analysis equipment can increase the Quality of Samples bearing specific keywords. Samples are most useful for understanding a particular node of the causal graph itself (which is a precondition for doing Experiments and ultimately devising Manipulations). Mechanically, the way this works is that each Phenomenon has a set of traits or keywords associated with different minimum sample qualities, and a roll modified by the head researcher's appropriate skill, the sample quality, and any lab context determines whether the highest viable trait is revealed, a lesser trait is revealed, or no new information is gained.

- Data involves large-scale aggregation of information about the Phenomenon - this is low risk but takes time and is dependent on Infrastructure (which can be constructed but itself takes time and money) - time and Infrastructure basically determine the quality of Data collected. Data is best suited for unlocking adjacent nodes of the causal graph. The way this works is similar to with Samples, but here the upstream node requires the highest quality to unlock; however, every parallel node which shares that upstream node that the researchers are aware of reduces that quality threshold by 1.

- Experiments require enough understanding of a particular node to form a hypothesis (corresponding to knowing a trait or keyword of the given node), but if successful they unlock the ability to manipulate or even replicate the behavior of a Phenomenon node. Ultimately, something like a plague would be resolved by finding a good enough bottleneck node (such that all the lethal consequences are downstream of that node) which one can also understand well enough to complete an Experiment, and then use that to devise a cure. The tricky thing is that the specific ways in which a given Phenomenon can be manipulated are based on the keywords associated with that Phenomenon - finding out that the high altitude deaths are due to genetic changes isn't helpful if you don't have the ability to change everyone's genome, for example. Over campaign-length timescales, General Research can be accumulated which can allow for new kinds of node manipulation.

General Research and Technologies

The current set of Technologies are those things which one can do given understanding of a Phenomenon with particular keywords. For example, a Technology could be 'Prevent the effects of a Genetic Node' or 'Recreate the effects of a Particle node'. There is a base set of technologies that the civilization the researchers are in starts with. As Projects are completed and nodes are understood and manipulated, this generates XP which can be spent to unlock new forms of manipulation.

[Kapow]

I once made a joke about DSA having rules for what happens if you don't sharpen your sword, and I'm still not certain if 'it did in previous editions' was continuing the joke or not
It wasn't.
There were (are?) rules for weapon and armor care.

I liked the granularity and mainly strayed from DSA, because it was hard for new players to get into it and I started playing a lot with young teens with no RPG experience at all.

I think the non-combat optional for characters where great for role-playing inspiration.
We once had a group consisting of a cook, a charioteer, a pacifistic monk and an engineer - and it wasn't just feasible, it was great fun.

Elaborating in my previous post:
There were rules for materials used, but it was following a sympathetic philosophy, so creativity was rewarded.

[Satinavian]

I once made a joke about DSA having rules for what happens if you don't sharpen your sword, and I'm still not certain if 'it did in previous editions' was continuing the joke or notAs Kapow said, this is totally true.

And of course the system also has had a ridiculous amount of subsystems. However i am not sure all that many are a good inspiration.

It had for example :

- 3 different alchemy subsystems, two of them with lots of very flaverful recipies that were a headache at the table
- a very extensive rulesystem about horses : horse races, training of horses, quirks of horses, horse breeding, caring for horses, food for horses, varies tricks of horses ... written by horse lovers and horse owners and way too detailed for most tables
- several editions had extensive hunting subsystems
- an extensive subsystems around herbs and their use
- 3 different settlement building subsystems (none particularly good)
- 2 fief gouverning subsystems (math too simple, bad results outside a narrow band of stats )
- a mercantile subsystem for playing merchants
- an alternative magic system based on ideas borrowed from Ars Magica. 3 times adjusted over editions.
- an alternative system for spontanous miracles for people who don't like priests having de-facto spells
- house and stronghold building rules and siege rules
- a mass combat system
- an elaborate artificing system
- a magical research subsystem
- several summoning subsystems. Those exist because none of them was widely regarded as all that good.
- 2 naval battle systems
- a book with nothing but travel, survival and exploration rules (i don't call it a subsytem as those were mostly standalone rules)

And i am sure i forgot half of them.

Now DSA/TDE is a system that cares a lot about stuff beyond combat. However that does not mean it handles all that all that well. But in the end, it is pretty versatile and can handle campaigns that are not the classical combat-focused adventure well enough.

[Anonymouswizard]

- an extensive subsystems around herbs and their use

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e also has an entire book dedicated to being a herbalist. It's one of those things where you're not going to need it, up until the exact moment where the characters need to get a remedy with no healing magic in sight.

Plus herbalism, like alchemy, makes for characters who can make astonishingly good use of Downtime.

[Duff]

Ars Magica has not only the best spellcasting rules but an extensive system for magical research and for crafting magic items.

Agreed. in Ars, Magic is where it's at.
Also has a pretty good system for making covenants

The Ronan games Game of Thrones system had the most developed social contest system I've seen. It needed house rules to take into account people getting helpf from their friends, and situations where 2 parties each try and convince a 3rd.
But it was a game where a lot of house ruling was required, so this is not a recommendation of the game as such.
It also had a reasonable system for running your noble house and doing battles. Though if you ever run a battle, a single skilled archer can take an army appart