I managed to game with the creator of X-Crawl at Origins and it was a blast. It’s a crazy mashup of classic fantasy dungeon crawling and reality TV the likes of WWE, Running Man, or SmashTV. As fun as it was to play, Pathfinder wouldn’t be my first choice for X-Crawling.
Brendan LaSalle has been developing X-Crawl (and running it at cons) for over 10 years. It’s current incarnation, Maximum X-Crawl, is realized in Pathfinder… not my normal cup of tea. The approach of the Pathfinder version is very well done, and if you are a Pathfinder fan then you should absolutely head over to Goodman Games and buy a copy. We had a blast playing the (currently in playtest) Anaheim Crawl — Steampunk Rodeo Clown Ninja Cowboys do indeed spice up a battle.
Honestly, that last bit got me thinking. The way Pathfinder is structured, many of the elements that make up a monster or a character manifest as die roll modifiers for an effect that is often just a different amount of hit point damage. As a result, the Steampunk Rodeo Clown Ninja Cowboys were not much more than agile orcs. From a roleplaying perspective it was an absolute hoot, but I’m the kind of guy who prefers to have roleplaying elements realized with game mechanics to reinforce their narrative importance. Don’t get me wrong, I think Brendan is of the same mind too, but I think the tools do influence the final result.
Pathfinder has great character definition and an incredible amount of material to build on. Spells and other effects are very discreetly defined, making tournament style play about as fair as can possibly be. So, if I were to choose a different system to run X-Crawl in, what systems would support the same style of play and definition?
HERO System and Savage Worlds.
Why HERO System?
Well, because it can do anything AND the anything that it does is always codified in a way to support tournament style play. With a little forethought on X-Crawl Campaign Guidelines (and power gamers to push those limits) you could create a setup where any player could walk up to an X-Crawl game anywhere and play, using their own character.
Additionally, HERO combat is extremely dynamic, comprehensive, and honestly not as deadly as Pathfinder, which is good for a game where monsters cost a lot of money for corporations to buy and characters want to make a career out of combat. Also, in the hands of a good GM combat can move pretty quickly, or at least no more slowly than Pathfinder, so playtime-wise we would see no change in the amount of time required to complete a crawl.
I played an Athlete in the game which is kind of a fighter/monk. I focus on grappling and mobility in a game that doesn’t have comprehensive grappling rules. Many of the stunts that Brendan has created address this and I was able to do some of the things a “wrestler” should, but I saw so many opportunities where if I had a Professional Wrestling martial art in HERO I would have been hammin’ up the joint.
Finally, HERO opens up so many character possibilities that the diversity of characters that might show for an event could be amazing. I wouldn’t want to upset the theme of X-Crawl, but even in limiting the scope of characters to trad-fantasy you still have so many choices, unique spells, powers, and so on. The beauty is, with a copy of Maximum X-Crawl book you could play this tomorrow with any group of HERO players.
Why Savage Worlds?
That is a great question. I’m not much of an SW fan when it comes to most things, but I enjoy the game every time I play it. One place I think it really shines is for the one-shot or a convention cycle. The game is easy to pick up and play with no experience and supports an incredible amount of options for as rules-lite as it is. These elements make it perfect for X-Crawl. How do I know?
I ran it.
You can too. Grab a crawl (I ran Dungeon Detonation from FreeRPG Day) and go. Now, my Savage-Fu is not nearly as strong as my HERO-Fu, but in a single evening we were able to make Veteran (40XP) characters using the Savage Worlds Deluxe rules plus the Fantasy Companion. I gave everyone $2500 + 1d6x$1000 starting money (exploding dice) and followed the Loot rules in Fantasy Companion. We almost finished the crawl in about 4 hours. Another 1/2 hour and we would have done it. There was some rules refresher mixed in there, so I know we lost a little time to that.
Overall, I enjoyed it more than the Pathfinder version. I’m somewhat of a math guy, so the probability “curve” associated with SW dice mechanics makes me a little crazy. However, for the game that is X-Crawl I think the “curve” works just fine and certainly adds to the madness in a positive way.
Grandstanding
This is one of my favorite aspects of the game. When playing, I always looked for that one action I could leverage into pumping up the crowd. I first saw this mechanic way back in The Hunt, and it was one of the more fun aspects of that game too. Not wanting to add skills, we replaced Guts with Grandstanding which seemed to work well. Most characters in PF are going to have about level+3 bonus on this skill, so I thought it safe to just make it a standard 4 target number (possibly modified by what they did or the type of room) to earn Temporary Fame. That seemed to work out well. Every raise adds 1 to the Mojo pool as well.
Temporary Fame
We treated Temporary Fame as Bennies with a twist, and that incentive worked very well. Any Temp Fame held at the end of the crawl can be used as normal.
Mojo
We had about half as much Mojo as normal for PF, because of dice scale. Mojo is a pool of points that players can choose to award to other players before they roll.
Action
Fast! Furious! Fun! True to form, SW played the way it should. The system got out of the way but still supported some crazy action. The exploding dice mechanic only added extreme nature of the game. Combat moved quickly and the spotlight was definitely on character choices rather than mechanics and resolution.
Conclusion
Alas, I doubt either will be realized as a licensed book, but I will be definitely running one or both of these conversions in my next convention cycle. I think it would be awesome to walk into some con and see an entire SW or HERO X-Crawl tournament running, and maybe some day I will organize one. So many games, so little time.