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Design Notes for Vanguard Free Roleplaying
The design notes are not complete. Here are three fragments on Action Resolution (the ARC), Armor, and general principles.
The ARC
The action result chart, or ARC, is the result of many revisions. More than ten years ago Mark Kalina and our late friend Mark Tsuji created a system that described action attempts in terms of degrees of success. About the same time Matthew DeBell created a system that used one d100 roll to determine the number of shots that hit when long bursts of automatic fire were used. Mark Kalina adapted this Autofire Resolution Chart to the general success engine that he and Mark Tsuji had devised, and the first version of the ARC was born. This was a large, unsightly table that, in its ultimate form, filled an entire page with about 360 cells. Though ugly and scary, this table had good statistical properties and was easy to fine-tune. Mark Kalina created a less flexible but much handier version based on 2d10, and finally with help from Dan Liebgold, Matt converted it to the simple 2d6 format used here.
We are pleased with the final result because it is simple and flexible, and the table can be memorized by GMs after they have used it a while. It is simple in that 2d6 plus skill level equals the number of successes, and a result of 10 or more indicates success. It is flexible in that this success mechanism can be applied to all kinds of skills, and the degree of success can be expressed in terms of time, money, distance, or whatever the situation calls for. It helps combat move quickly because only one roll is required no matter how many shots a character fires in one turn.
General Principles
Basic design concepts applied in the creation of Vanguard include the following:
Render a background that offers a bright future. The universe we envision has much of what people yearn for -- opportunities, wonders, creativity, and adventure.
Attend to detail. Backgrounds can easily fall apart when their details don't exist, or worse yet, are contradictory. Since players have a way of prodding under the veneer of a background, we have tried to furnish rich details that will let the background withstand inspection.
Insist on plausibility. The features of our background and rules are not always realistic, but they are as plausible as we know how to make them within the context of this sort of game -- hard science fiction RPG featuring space colonies about 150 years in our future.
Minimize the amount of thinking required to implement the rules. Players should be thinking about the adventure, not the game rules. To this end, we use only simple arithmetic, and minimize it where possible. Where arithmetic is required, we favor the easiest operations. We think that for most people most of the time, addition is the easiest operation, which is why the task resolution system is based on adding a die roll, skill level, and modifiers.
Allow the use of tables, but limit the frequently used tables to a number that the GM can easily keep handy.
Keep the number of die rolls low, but recognize that taking time to think about things or perform a table-lookup is more onerous than an extra die roll. We managed to have normal combat require three rolls: one to-hit, one for hit location, and one for damage effects.
Armor
Armor effectiveness is a complex problem. The ability of various materials to stop bullets can vary non-linearly with the thickness of the material, and the relative effectiveness of various materials differs depending on the kind of attack. An armor material may work superbly against lasers, moderately well against high-velocity projectiles, and dismally against knives. Armor that is effective against heavy weapons when it is a meter thick may be relatively useless against small arms when it is millimeters thick.
We made two design decisions that limit our ability to reflect this complexity in the rules. First, we decided to use only one measure of armor effectiveness, the Armor Value. We prefer not to burden our game masters and players by giving stats for body armor’s effectiveness against many different kinds of weapons. Second, we decided that the system of armor penetration must be linear. It will not do to require players to take square roots or other onerous operations.
As a result of these two design decisions, we are limited to a single measure of Armor Value that varies linearly with the thickness of the armor. Since most combat is anticipated to involve small arms penetrating body armor, we have leaned in favor of accuracy on that scale rather than accuracy on the scale of kilograms of explosives destroying meters of concrete.