When Ghosts Punch Back!

This “designing roleplaying games” stuff is hard. Not because it’s hard to come up with mechanics for doing what the game needs to do, but because it’s hard to tell which mechanics are best-suited for the job. For each game-design problem, there are countless solutions. The trick is finding the right one that works in balance with the rest of the system.

Case in point: As promised, I’ve been working on the mechanics for how ghosts attack people in Ghost Punchers. While Savage Worlds comes with a full suite of systems for combat, ghosts are a little trickier since they are, by nature, immaterial, which makes punching something in the world of flesh a little bit of a challenge.

Furthermore, we’ve established that:

• Ghosts can drain “human life energy” or “Essence.”
  
• This Essence is what keeps them from fading into the afterlife.
  
• Essence can also be spent to let them interact with the physical world.
  
• More powerful ghosts (the “feudal lords” or “mob bosses” of the underworld) collect tributes of essence from lesser ghosts.
  

So now, in conjunction with spectral violence, I’m looking at mechanics for draining, stockpiling, and spending Essence — and how ghosts “fade away” if they don’t get enough of it on a regular basis.

Whew! All that to figure out how a ghost can punch back.

I’ll be honest. My first thought is to use Power Points to represent Essence. But that would mean creating a new Arcane Background just for ghosts, and using Savage World‘s powers system to represent ghosts’ supernatural abilities. But the more I thought about, the more I realized this would be redundant, since the core rules already have “monstrous abilities” for antagonists that replicate most of the powers in a streamlined fashion.

Adding a new Arcane Background would work, but it would force the GM to track Power Points for every ghost in the adventure, which is extra bookkeeping. Also, the “stockpiling” aspect of Essence would require ghosts to be able to exceed their normal allotment of Power Points, which deviates from normal Savage Worlds rules. Clearly, the mechanic would do what I needed, but wasn’t the right one for the job.

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board!

Now that you’ve seen how the sausage is made (and seasoned with a bit of RPG design theory), next time we can check out the sausage itself and see if it is indeed fast, furious, and fun.