By: Chris Acuff

As I talked about in this post, I am running a game in the Wrath and Glory rule system. That post is all about why I think it is dope, and if you are into 40K it is a good option to try. 

However

We came into an interesting discussion after the party encountered a couple of ambush attacks. (which, if you read the “my favorite monster” posts, you know I love.) They, being D&D players, are used to saving throws for traps and area of effect type abilities. So stepping on a mine, or getting yeeted fifty meters into the air by a psyched-out yeti-spider mutant, with no save didn’t feel great. 

In my mind, as a GM, I look at the system and go, “well that idea of a save is compensated for by armor being a damage soak instead of a hit or don’t hit value and you can increase it by diving for cover, and you can interact by rolling for shock, which functions as a kind of shield.” except, that still feels less interactive. 

What does that mean? Because in other ways, I actually think the game has more interactivity. By stacking abilities and modifiers you can make your dice pool for tests and attacks massive. Those dice can transfer over, depending on the roll, for extra damage or enhanced skill result. That interaction with the dice pool is the core of the game, and I like the options that it gives that are not available in other systems. It allows massed fire from weak enemies to all be consolidated into one, actually threatening roll to a stronger target. It creates much more interaction at the damage value roll via the moving of dice from your attack pool to damage pool. 

But, when something is happening to you, it just happens. You have your defensive options, but there’s no way to interact directly with the attack or effect itself. Doing it this way simplifies the calculations needed and speeds up combat pretty significantly.

I think why, even still, this feels bad to a player coming from D&D, is the types of things that you could protect yourself from with a save are big effects, or effects you didn’t know were happening until they happened. Without any kind of save at all, players have less control over what happens to the character. There’s a part of me that goes, “yes but if you math it out correctly in design, the effect on numbers is more or less the same.” That is not satisfying for a player because they lack the feeling of having a reaction, as I said above, even if that reaction slows down the game and maybe has less of an effect when it comes to damage than can be compensated with by balancing and the stat-checks based on toughness. 

I am not going to try to add a save mechanic to the game because it is not designed for it. The first thing that probably would have helped would be reminding my players about the dive for cover action when stepping on the mine. The rest, I think, we will run with the current rules, and see if that feeling goes away over time. 

There will be pros and cons to every system. I think W&G is more interactive and interesting in its basic mechanics than D&D, but it is clear that not having an expected level of interaction with effects that happen to characters is viewed initially as an understandable downside.