Seasoning to Taste: Tweaks The Strong & The Wise Classes

Aurore Folny, Boromir

An important part of running Whitehack is making it your own. The game offers lots of dials and levers to tune for your campaign setting and to support a variety of character types. Even so, certain mechanics might spark confusion or distaste. And if referees or players are going to take issue with anything in the Whitehack, it’s usually one of two things in my experience: the Strong's looting ability and Miracles costing HP.

I'm no stranger to house rules and I prefer to be accommodating to the tastes of my players rather than all by-the-book all the time, so here are some tweaks and musings when these points have come up over the years.

The Strong

On Conflict Looting

As the mechanical interface players look towards for a classic warrior or fighting experience, the Strong's ability to "loot" conflicts for spendable bonuses or uses of substances/supernatural abilities can easily be seen as out of place. And if it doesn't click, it sparks the same questions too. Is every martial type character in Whitehack a blue mage? How am I supposed to explain this in my setting? Is my warrior magical or something? Why is my fighter weird?

As a short explainer, Strong characters can hold powers, tactics, tricks, substances, etc. from conflicts. You can hold a number equal to your level and defeating foes yields them. This rule has evolved quite a bit over the editions and the 4e implementation is probably the most open it's been.

In defense of the ability, it's pretty simple to just talk it through. The trivial example of this is to lean into the mundane or supernatural bit as much or as little as you desire. It's easy for the Strong Mercenary to never go full blue-mage, primarily preferring to stack his loot pool with special conflict as tactics learned while "on the job" or substance loot. It's also easy for the Strong Death Knight to corrupt the abilities of the holy crusaders they slay and use them for dark purposes, as well as representing the special conflict loot as boons from their dark masters. In a similar vein, perhaps the Strong Occultist makes a fitting host for the spirits of certain enemies when they are slain by their hand. You get the idea here, I hope. It's completely in the table's control how mundane or fantastical this ability is and how it can work in the setting.

(I consider this ability to parallel the original tradition Fighter's ability to exclusively use magical swords, which often had a grab bag of magical quirks, senses, and abilities) 

Alternate Option: True Grit

If the cognitive dissonance is too much and simply downplaying it isn't satisfactory, I present this alternative. The idea is to appeal to the hardy and redoubtable martial archetype characters across fiction and their ability to just get back up (think Boromir at his last stand).

Replace the looting ability of the Strong entirely with the following (or allow as an alternative option on per character basis, either works): 

Strong characters stand fast, taking what harm comes their way. If a Strong character has zero or negative HP, but is not dying and wants to stay in action, the player may opt to make a true grit save (or toughness task roll).

• A successful save means that the Strong is only knocked down. They may get up and continue the battle at their current HP (if they had negative HP they are still injured).
• A critical success means that the Strong is still standing, continuing the battle at their current HP (and possibly injured). 
• A failed save means that the Strong is dying (d6 minutes).
• A fumble means the Strong dies on the spot from the effort to ignore their condition. Sometimes you need to known when to stay down!

Strong characters ignore the encumbrance penalty for being injured. On top of this, they die in d6 minutes instead of d6 rounds if they fail a death save from having negative HP.

Regardless of milieu, you can now focus on your Strong characters being the toughest bastards in the party. This is adapted from a general PC ability and the martial Prime class from Whitehack's cousin game, Suldokar's Wake. I often find it a good mine of semi-compatible ideas, if they don't exist in form in 4e already.

On Strong Abilities #1-8

The Strong class eight abilities that can be assigned to slots as the character advances. Understand that these are not exhaustive and that you are encouraged to add to this list. For example, 4e introduces an alternative ability better suited to modern firearms in it's optional rules. Perhaps there is a far more potent ability that can be only discovered, passed on to the character via training, or some other fantastical method. This list is a powerful tool to customize for your campaign and cooking up some interesting fighting styles or options to add here can only help.

On Combat Advantage

DCC RPG is often regarded as having an excellent implementation of the fighter archetype. I think a big reason for this is two-fold:

1. The Mighty Deeds mechanize and present an approachable menu of the tactical infinity to players, allowing awareness of more options beyond "idk I attack them".
2. The way Deed dice work don't punish you for trying said stunts. You are not sacrificing damage or actions or anything to try something. It's basically always in your benefit to be doing wild shit.

These get at some core issues. Some players might only look to roll dice for normal attacks when its not clear how other actions could benefit them. Some Referees might be shaky when faced with players who are very inventive and want to stick to codified things. Not ideal conditions!.

Consider the following: 

"Magick, abilities or situational circumstances can daze, stun, blind, hold, deafen, confuse etc. a character or monster. Positive effects can be cover, invisibility, blurring, increased speed etc. The Referee interprets unregulated cases using combat advantage, free attacks and penalties or bonuses to df, damage, move, initiative or av." -- Whitehack 4e, p. 59

Short of trying somehow to inject Deeds into the Strong (which can yield results in a wholly new class), I find the DCC Deeds ethos easy to embody with the above. Don't disallow swashbuckling deeds not codified in rules text out of hand, but instead grant a bonus when a player thinks of something clever in their fighting. Create interesting areas, foes, and conflicts that encourage this thinking and interaction. The formalized options in the text should be a starting point, not an exhaustive list of what's possible. You want players who know that trying thinks will be rewarded and you want referees who have a simple framework to adjudicate such things.

David Gallagher, Pyromancer

The Wise

Miracles Cost HP

I think it goes without saying that for some folks, it can be easy to have the perception of "HP go down" as always feeling bad, even if that HP going down results in good things (like miracles) happening. Meanwhile, I think folks see "managing bad number go up" as feeling good, e.g. any number of ttrpg corruption or sanity mechanics ever. 

While all the characters sharing common resources to deal with conflict and exploration (slots, items, and HP) is elegant design imo, I want to accommodate the scenario where paying HP just feels off for folks at the table without introducing some new resource or meta thing to track for Wise characters only. The lack of a "mana" pool or other makes the magic (or perceived magic in some cases) of miracles easy to flex across settings.

Alternate Option: Drain

The idea is that it is largely functionally identical to vanilla system, doesn't change how miracles work at their core, and (perhaps most importantly in some cases) isn't as easy to see as punitive.  

Instead of paying HP costs to perform Miracles, use scrolls, or any other item that draws HP, characters instead accumulate Drain. Drain represents the accumulated fatigue, strain, and internal diminishment from manipulating magical forces. If a character’s Drain is ever equal to or greater than their current HP, either because their Drain increased or because they lost HP, they must Save vs Death or take their current Drain total as damage (which can be lethal!).

Wise characters remove half of their Drain with a night’s rest, removing it fully if they succeed at a constitution task roll. They now also recover HP in the same manner as other characters. The “magickal interference” rules now refer to magical ways of removing Drain instead of magical healing of HP.

This option also brings the Wise into line with the rest of the characters regarding healing, eliminating their special exceptions while also keeping their HP as a central resource to manage for the class.