Metalhed

This is the best AI could do with the instructions provided. I only use AI for conceptual things. This is…pretty close, actually, to what I want.

Anyone who knows me pretty well also knows that I play in a metal band. The band is called Whorrify and we have played everything from basement shows where people are being literally thrown into the ceiling to bigger venues in the city opening for some bigger bands like Cradle of Filth that one time, a time no one will let us forget about, not even us, because two of the bands at that show were more gothic melodic oriented stuff and we play what I refer to as “surf grind” because you could probably take most of the riffs I use, uptune them by about fifty steps, and you’d have something resembling a bad Beach Boys song.

Anyone who knows me pretty well and has been here from the start will also know that I really like Doom. I like doom so much that my avatar on here was an Arch-Vile until I started watching Smiling Friends and realized that I AM Charlie - easily annoyed by absurd situations, Christian but maybe not particularly good at it, a bit of a nasally voice thanks to mechanical issues in my throat, and slightly jaundiced. But it’s okay, I’ve taken care of that last one - treat your liver right, kids.

But Doom is special to me. Doom is so special to me that the franchise comprises about 80 percent of the video gaming that I do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve beaten the original four episodes of Doom, the first half of Doom 2 (Sorry Sandy, the city levels are just too confusing and I still feel like there should have been a class action lawsuit for people still suffering PTSD from The Chasm - you do good work but that was just…so, so cruel.) I’ve beaten Plutonia on Ultra-Violence several times and it NEVER gets easier, not to mention a slough of other WAD’s like Sigil, Sunlust, Going Down, Eviternity…if I try to remember them all I will literally be here all day. Doom 2016 I just beat again this past week and it’s perfection. So perfect it made me realize all the flaws in the follow up Doom Eternal which are:

1. It’s so good it makes every other game look lame and embarrassing in comparison.

2. The Horde mode is fine, but it’s somehow not as good as the fan made Horde mode which I played the absolute shit out of.

Doom isn’t the only thing, oh no. I play quite a few shooters, Boltgun being the latest after I realized that it turns into an actual game with tactics and tension when you crank the difficulty up to Exterminatus, Ion Fury is the last Build engine game I beat and I absolutely loved it to death, and anyone who doesn’t try Turbo Overkill, or literally name any New Blood published game is making a huge mistake and possibly is a bad person.

Aeons ago in Joel and Internet Time I was working on a game I called Perfect Hatred, evoking one of the sacred Doom level names which was my way of translating the ever-beloved “boomer shooter” (they are Doom clones. Just call them Doom clones.) genre into a pen and paper experience. My solution for emulating that experience was a lot different then than it is now and didn’t include shamelessly pulling mechanics from Balatro which I’m actually gonna use to demonstrate ideas here in this very blog, so lucky you, and if you have a PS Plus subscription know that Balatro is FREE right now, and that this is also practically a criminal act because there is no way the creator of Balatro should not be making ALL of the money even though I found a way to spam upgrading my Full House to level 20 in my fifth run and beat it. There is always Endless Mode after that, but it felt a little too easy to solve the “puzzle” of hitting 100,000 points.

Rolling a ton of dice seemed to be the way. And I think if you go the dice route, it probably is the way. Shooters like Doom are typically about running into a room full of evil and frantically circle strafing while you fire off an entire arsenal and try not to blow your face off with splash damage, so a D20 roll followed by a damage roll…yawn. I don’t know about you, but I want mechanics in my games to feel thematically cohesive with the rest of the experience. You should feel at least in part like you are doing the thing you are doing. There is probably a fancy term for this but I don’t know it because my education was High School followed by a technical class in College followed by reading books about Chinese history that were fifty years out of date. I just know when things feel right and when they don’t, and while chucking handfuls of dice was pretty close, I just wasn’t getting the same level of satisfaction that I shot for, so I shelved that project and then picked up and shelved several more.

It says something about my inconsistency I’m sure, and that’s a fine and justifiable criticism. Looking back on this blog, I had about ten different ideas and all of them were processed until they either fell into oblivion or were merged into other things. Now I don’t even have the full scope of them in my head. I have many reasons for this and none of them are laziness - they are perched on the back of a tendency of mine to be able to really, really easily throw something away if I’m not happy with it. It’s why I have written two novels that I hit the delete button on, though I think one of them survived on an external hard drive. And the minute I find it it’s getting purged like a Cyberdemon - hit delete on it until it dies.

This idea I wasn’t expecting to come back, but as we have been working on a pretty fun card mechanic in the context of a wargame with a created lore that came out of my business partners psyche and that I have been gingerly expanding on, I still felt like it would be a shame if I didn’t try to apply it to the RPG space, because it also has potential to work for that and that was it’s genesis. But rather than having it be sort of generic and universal in an attempt to possibly hit a broader audience for it, I decided to foolishly chop off those conduits at their roots and make it ULTRA specific to a group of people that would be best described using a venn-diagram.

Man you can get AI to do anything badly. I’m pretty sure if you actually had some data, it would just be one circle. And everyone in it would be fat and have a beard.

Metalhed isn’t exactly for heavy metal fans. It’s not a book full of metal references, so far the text has way more video game references, but it’s trying to encapsulate that same energy of absurd techno-violence and riffs in drop F#.

A Super Metroid reference, a Doom Eternal reference, a Dungeon Crawl Classics reference and a Scarface reference in the same text? So sue me, and maybe Nintendo will, but I doubt Brian De Palma will care and if he does, start with 90’s era NAS - I’m the least of your problems.

Anyways blah blah blah, vague galactic marine slop as an excuse to kill a lot of monsters. The style of Metalhed is roughly equivalent to how Cyberpunk presents itself, in that the focus of the game are “gigs”, and they are also called “gigs” here after a long session of conferring with the legality of using “gigs” instead of adventures because your party is called a Band, and the referee is called the Soundguy. Because metal, haha, so funny and clever please give me an award for my brilliance in taking the most obvious path here.

I’ve been loving Cyberpunk for that reason, and also because I like downtime. I always turn downtime into in-between busy work over Discord so that having a fake conversation with a fake NPC about nothing doesn’t drag on and pollute a session where exciting things should be happening, and Metalhed takes that same approach. You go down to the surface of a planet with a handful of other reprobates, kill demons and try not to kill eachother in the process, grab some kind of McGuffin that makes you slightly richer, and then go back to your comfy space fortress before doing it all over again next week. Or month. Or year, depending on how many people in your groups have these things called “kids” or “lives” or “serious jobs.”

It’s in brainstorm land right now, but the intention is to have a two page spread for each system I provide, focusing on one planet, it’s general biome and points of interest, and the “Mobs” you find there. There is a lot of video game terminology, but the idea is that monsters work better in groups. There are entire books about this as it relates to running D&D since D&D does an exceptionally poor job of teaching you how to build interesting encounters, but I’m cuttin’ out the middleman. Instead of an alphabetical listing of enemies, each system has groups of enemies you will run into that can be scaled according to how many people are playing and how tough you want the challenge to be, usually accompanied by a “big bad end guy” (oof I hate that term, it sounds so juvenile, says the guy who still plays the same video games he did when he was twelve) who will undoubtedly be some sort of legally distinct take on the amazing character designs from heavy metal covers. The Godhead Azotar is himself just the Painkiller from Judas Priest with extra steps because fuck, look how cool the Painkiller is.

A winged god on a motorbike with sawblade wheels brighter than a thousand suns. Just LOOK at it.

The idea is to provide a flavor and a framework and let the referee fill out the rest because ultimately it’s not that important that they run this game with any real adherence to canon since it will be about as loose as the bushings on my sway bar. That’s not a euphemism - my van needs a ton of work done on it.

Metalhed doesn’t take itself very seriously and I want people to approach it with a similar spirit. Just look at the obligatory “what is an RPG” section.

The math is really the interesting part from a design perspective because it’s the real homogeneous meat-glue that holds the dollar-store steak together. I can’t say it’s not derivative of course because everything is, but it’s not derivative of anything I have seen in a tabletop RPG. It IS pretty derivative of Balatro because once I decided I wanted to use Poker as a base it was almost impossible not to shift my brain immediately over to that. But it’s derivative in two very specific respects.

1. You have a hand bigger than five cards…usually.

2. You have the opportunity to discard some of those cards and draw more to try and get a better hand.

In Balatro, these elements are baked into every run and are somewhat adjustable by drawing cards that extend your max hand-size, or allow you to discard more sets of cards during a round. In Metalhed, your hand-size is determined by the weapon you have equipped and how good you are at using it, and a stat called “Mag-size” which can be upgraded on particular weapons.

This hand of cards is…big, because I am pretty far into this current run. Unlike a typical 5-hand Poker game, I have 9 cards in this hand. In Metalhed, this would probably be restricted to a pretty powerful weapon - a rocket launcher, plasma gun, probably upgraded some, and would be represented by it’s Attack Value, which in this case would be AV 9. A smaller weapon like a pistol or your mitts would be AV 5.

To perform attacks in Metalhed, you need to make Poker hands. The better the hand, the better the attack. We have a pair of 5’s and A’s here so right away I could use Two Pair. Pairs and double Pairs represent the most basic attack a gun is capable of, and you want to hang on to them - we will get to why later.

In this case, an AV 9 gone probably has a pretty decent mag-size. I have 4 available Discards in Balatro here, so we will say this gun is MAG 4. Discards in Metalhed are called Reloads, and they are how many times you can reload that gun in a single combat.

Reloading allows you to discard 4 cards and draw 4 new ones. Sometimes you want to save a reload for if you don’t have an available hand. But if you are feelin’ lucky (punk) you may want to use a Reload to try and get a more powerful hand.

I’ve selected my four cards to Reload here.

I lose the pair 5’s, but I have gained a pair of J’s. Why is this important? Because the referee defends by playing his own hands. And if he can play a hand that is greater than yours in rank, or the same rank but with higher numbers, it negates your attack. Same goes for PVP - will get into that later.

This is essentially a system that doesn’t track HP - for players. The referee has to track hits, and has to make things come together narratively to make sense in the context of the game. Here’s the thing - I actually like HP. I don’t like when things have so much of it that combat takes an hour. I want to keep bookkeeping to a minimum, and put it squarely on the shoulders of the referee so that players don’t really have to bother with it. Available Mags for each weapon are tracked by stacks of Poker chips, and players do not have HP.

Players do not have HP.

I tried to make a shitty hand of Balatro but it’s basically impossible for how badass I am, and now I’ve ruined my run by using Balatro as a system for generating screenshots that probably could have been done a hundred other better ways. But at some point, a player is gonna run out of Mags, and they are going to find that they don’t have a playable hand.

If this ever happens, they are dead.

Death in Metalhed is not the same as death in other games. No one is ever REALLY gone in the world of boomer shooters because they just respawn after a few seconds. In Metalhed, the same is true - a dead player comes back after a number of rounds set by a value on their character sheet.

The only real way to die in Metalhed is a TPK. But if a TPK ever happens, that’s it, it’s lights out, for everyone. Forever.

And if you look at the math so far you might be thinking “Well gee Joel, five players, everyone of them with an AV 9 gun, well how do you expect anyone to ever die you fat nerdy bastard?”

They can die because they don’t have hit points. Their life currency is cards, and their ability to attack. Because if you run out of ammo in Doom, you might as well call it a day. And enemies do not attack the Hit Points of a player, but they have to attack something.

The thing they are attacking is the players ability to form good hands.

Enemy groups have a pool of attacks. Which attacks they used are determined by a card draw. For smaller mobs of weak enemies, they may have a pool of two attacks determined by drawing A-K, where A-10 is their weaker attack, and J-K are tougher…or whatever, I’ll get to that when I get to it.

The whole combat system is trying to encapsulate the feeling of five dudes running and jumping off walls and firing plasma into by groups, dodging and deking out their way, and trying not to let the whole thing turn into a Benny Hill gag, so it’s meant to be kind of chaotic. It can be assumed that enemies are attacking everyone all of the time rather than targeting anyone in particular, because you know…there are hundreds of them at any given time and they are being slaughtered by the dozen in turn, so there isn’t really much room to keep track of individuals.

Instead when the referee attacks with a monster group, the attack they use determines how many cards are drawn onto the table in front of everyone. And then players need to engage in what I call “Parryslop”, since the only way to avoid damage is to parry and dodge attacks.

I took this from my video Poker days where you would play a simple game of high or low and try to call what card would come out next based on the last one. The first card ALWAYS hits. Remember hitscanners in Doom? Shotgunners and Chaingunners who could hit you from across the universe simply by being in line of sight? This is to simulate that general frustration. But for every card after that, the ref goes around the table and they have to call if the next card is gonna be higher or lower. If they are correct, that card is negated. The next card then has to be called, based on the last card whether it was negated or not, and by the end the ref should have a little spread in front of them. Any cards that were not negated by parrying matched by number to the available cards in a players hand - those same cards in their hands are useless for when they attack in that next round.

The players run into a room full of imps. The imps go to attack and draw a 6. A player FOOLISHLY declares that the next card is going to be high, but it is infact, an A. Now, the next player, empowered by their compatriots incompetency can easily declare the next card will be high, and they would of course be right, so the third attack doesn’t hit.

Because the 6 and the A were not parried, the 6 by default since it is “hitscanner damage”, the two 6’s and A in the players hand are effectively useless. This leaves them with a single pair with which to be able to attack, unless they spend a Mag trying to get rid of those dead cards and draw better stuff.

For the smaller mobs of enemies this isn’t a MAJOR problem, but when there are rooms with several enemy groups, or the big Godhead enemies, there might be four or more cards on the table that are limiting the attack power of everyone. This is where the potential for death and TPK comes to the table, and since a player is dead for consecutive rounds, and the ability to parry diminished (card draws by the referee are based on the number of players, but are not reduced when a player dies) things can get really desperate really fast…in theory.

In THEORY.

Because these things really are theory until they are tested. I’ve done some basic testing alone but it’s not very objective. A Metalhed campaign will have players able to upgrade their affinity for specific weapons - they don’t really “level up” per se, they just get better at doing stuff, so it plays more like Helldivers or something where gear is really king. Skill checks are done by drawing high cards, and there are other things I am toying with like using Blackjack as a way to perform more complex back and forth actions for more of the roleplaying oriented, non-combat stuff. There are going to be difficulty levels inspired by the cheeky tone of difficulty levels in boom shoots applied to each mission that yield better rewards, making the campaign a little more like a game of Conquest in 40k or grand strategy games where players can select from a pool of available missions rather than being restricted to the adventure set out before them. And there are plenty of other references to the genre, like the fact that the primary mode of play is called “Co-Op Mode” for the get-along-gang, and that there is a slightly Braunstein influenced but-not-really competitive mode of play called Deathmatch.

There is more meat and bones on the combat beyond just what I have gotten into here, classes are a thing but they primarily influence your preferred loadout - anyone can pick up any gun and fire it, but what is AV 8 for one player might be AV 5 for another if it doesn’t fit their class, weapons have abilities that not only damage enemy groups but also have other effects such as splash damage and debuffs.

I think the biggest takeway here is that I want to really streamline the experience in a way that makes combats move quickly so you can have a lot of them. I want it to feel a much like a frantic game of Doom that it possibly can. Deathmatch will go a long way here - that mode is centered around arenas built by arranging cards on a table. An Arena looks something like this on a table and…I dunno, this parts harder to explain and I’m running short on time writing this, but it looks something like this, players split into teams, and have to run around grabbing objectives while murdering eachother, giving secret orders on where they are going similar to a Stein where the referee then has to resolve those orders and any combats that happen in between them, and random hazards and powerups can pop up in the Arena with a card draw made from an identical deck to the ranks on the table determining where they pop up.

I guess the real question is - why the fuck would you play this instead of just playing Doom?

As a Doom fan I’m legally obligated not to answer that. But there probably isn’t one.

It’s Sunday, I’m sick, and I’m bored, and this is how I have been frivolously spending my weekend. Leave me alone.