The Culture: When The Game Almost Nails What The Hobby Is About

As promised last week, this Sunday we revisit West End Games' TORG. This 1990 game, subtitled "Role-Playing The Possibility Wars", had serious promise despite it being caught up in the mistaken belief that RPGs are not wargames that had become a Cargo Cult Dogma by that time. While a new edition is out there, it too suffers from the flaws mentioned below (and some later ones added), and thus unfucking the 1990 original will also unfuck the new version.

What Went Wrong And Why

The entire point was to play out a war campaign. Players start the campaign a mere three months from its start, and then the entire global audience of players were to play out the entire war to its conclusion. To this end, there was a campaign newsletter ("Infiniverse") where leads would be published and those who followed up on them (for good or ill) would influence future product development.

Unfortunately, this was also meant to use Cargo Cult business practices: lots of Consume Product presumed, first in subsetting-specific supplements to flesh out factions and the territories controlled there initially (and also the specific rules procedures they specialized in to reflect that faction's unique power) and then modules and annual updates to move the timeline forward.

By 1994 the attempt proved a failure, but now--with the history of the hobby recovered from the Memory Hole--we can look back on this with fresh eyes and see just how little needs to be done with the 1990 ruleset to make it live up to what it promised.

Making TORG Great Again

In short, all that is needed is to lean into what is already there and remove Consume Product. Only one rule change is needed (explained below) and you're golden.

• Faction/Patron Play: Baked into the cake. The Delphi Council, the High Lords, and various governments and other institutions are clear and obvious factions in the campaign that are going to have skin in the game and thus will act in their interests- including getting Possibility-Rated people on board to get things done (or stop someone else). The only change you'd need to make is to put it into players' hands and handle their orders.
• 1:1 Timekeeping: No problem using this at all. Solves the "cinematic time" issue that contributed to the inability of the publisher to fulfill the product's promise of a proper war campaign by ensuring that when you get into the Mole Machine and go from the middle of the United States to Indonesia, you're going to be in Mandatory Downtime when that action is over. Training times are already acknowledged (as it's how Ords learn things), and strict accounting better fits the idea that multiple theaters of action are in the mix at the same time- especially once other factors are considered.
• Multiple Referees: Mandatory. A successful campaign will quickly go beyond what one man can handle; one per cosm is ideal, incluing one for Core Earth, with additional ones splitting up Core Earth regions. Multiple active parties moving around the world are part-and-parcel to the game, so having players play multiple characters (and swapping between them as they rotate to and from the bench), will make this happen sooner than later.
• Rules As Written: With one caveat (see below) the game is fine as it is, and even has built in the ability to handle mass combat. This ability to handle scale somehow slipped out of the brains of the publisher and developers back in the day, and isn't even considered now, but there it is- One On Many and Many On One is where you start and build out from there. Initiative By Side is baked into the rules, and only the Standard/Dramatic distinction complicates things (but, given that the war is over How Reality Works, excusable).

As you can see, all that's needed is to Remove Product and instead refocus on Player Feedback. The technology wasn't there to do this at a truly global scale in 1990; it is now, and trivially so.

Cull all concept of The Adventure Module and any other pre-determined outcomes from the game and what remains is the purest non-D&D expression of the real RPG--the fantastic adventure wargame--that is still readily available, easily explained, and not hobbled by a pants-on-head incompetent rules design or equally bad technical documentation.

This is not the direction that the current edition went. That's why it too isn't lighting the world on fire.

Until publishers accept that their business is not about pushing product, but about facilitating connection, this pattern of failure will continue.

The One Change Required

TORG suffers from a flaw in its rule design. Because you need to generate a high Bonus Number to hit a hard target, and you used the same number to calculate damage, when you attacked a speedy-but-fragile target any successful hit would splatter that target in one shot. This is known as the Glass Ninja Problem.

This doesn't sound like an issue until you see someone pop a ninja with a Ruger 10/22 and wreck him even if he's meant to be a tough and skilled enemy ace and this happens every single time.

Many years ago on the old TORG listserv an old-timer known as Kansas Jim put two common fixes on his old site:

This is generally considered one of the main problems with TORG by some people, including WEG who changed the mechanic for Shatterzone and Masterbook. Two solutions have been suggested on the list/newsgroup, the first one being the method WEG uses in Shatterzone/Masterbook:

• use the result points of the attack in place of the rolled bonus number as the bonus added to damage. A variant limits this by using either the result points or the generated bonus value, whichever is less. One important thing to do when using this method is to change all of the combat modifiers (Vital Blow, Blindside, etc) to reflect this change otherwise they won't work correctly (Shatterzone did not make this correction but Masterbook did.) The variant slightly complicates matters because you need both sets of combat modifiers and then have to apply the appropriate one based on which number gets used.
• a slightly more complicated method is to use the difference between the base skill values as a modifier to the generated bonus value. These methods favor whoever has the higher base skill by either lowering or raising the damage value in accordance with whoever has the higher skill; if the offensive character has the higher skill, damage will be higher. If the defensive character has the higher skill, damage is reduced. Variants depend on whether or not modifiers (such as an Active Dodge) are considered or just the base skill values are used and how the damage modifier is determined (most suggest either running the difference through the Power Push Table or dividing by some number.) One method adopts the Vital Blow maneuver by allowing characters to lower their attack skill value by increments of two and increase their damage value by increments of one. (Defending characters would get to do the same thing to increase their resistance to damage.)

I prefer the Shatterzone solution, in accordance to the K.I.S.S. maxim and the proof that tabletop games work best with simplicity in its procedural design.

Conclusion

Yes, there are issues to consider--this is not a Class/Level game and skill system are notorious for breaking--but TORG is already 90% there. You're not rebuilding from the ground up; you're just fixing a handful of Known Issues and then solving the bulk of the problem by fixing the stupid business model behind the game.

Oh, as for cloning this game? Easy-peasy; most of the work will be the tedium of changing the jargon terminology, rewriting the manuals to a cleaner technical standard, and commissioning replacement art and logos (where public domain work is insufficient). You don't even need to do Drama Deck print runs these days. Do it as Gonnerman does for Basic Fantasy and your clone could be available by Christmas if you started today.

Next Sunday? EXALTED!