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Once upon a time, Splicer made the mistake of asking me about how my Fantasy Heartbreaker was coming along over in the TG Design Thread. I began dumping design ideas, goals, and analysis into the thread. Over 17,000 words later Winson asked me to move it to a new thread. The Goal My goal is to create a D20/FATE/DungeonWorld mashup that applies D20 aesthetics to a shared-narrative story-game. Some Google Docs
Credit Where Credit is Due Most of the ideas that I am putting into this game are not new, they are just existing concepts put together in a novel way. I am drawing inspiration from existing games such as:
Why this game? Or to rephrase it: why not some other game? As many other table top gamers out there, I can't help but think about how existing systems might be "improved" by applying my subjective tastes to them. Here is how I hope to differ from existing systems:
Anything New Here? With so much inspiration to draw from this could easily end up just a novel recombination of ideas. However I'm hoping to contribute a few things: - Define characters by what type of encounter they are good at - De-emphasize balance within individual encounters in favor of letting each character have their moment - Equate character progression with increasing shared narrative Where to next? In the design thread I wrote about 17,000 words of design rationale and analysis that amounted to about 1000 words of rules. The idea is still taking shape so expect more navel-gazing heartbreaking pontification. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 14, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2013 15:25
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NO COMBAT BALANCE!? Some may balk at the idea of a modern RPG without balanced combat, but I think it better to subdivide the game into different scenes where each player's character has a chance to shine. Although the game as described has been genre-neutral, there is specific element of genre emulation that I am going for, and that is that the player characters form a "dream team" of complimentary talents. The division of the game into scene-based specialties is mean specifically to drive the game towards emulation of famous adventuring parties such as: The A-Team Hannibal (Exploration) - The brains that find opportunities and information. B.A. (Creative/Combat) - The dual-class mechanic/inventor and fighter. Face (Social) - The smooth-talking con-man. Murdock (Movement) - The pilot and driver. The Scoobies Buffy (Combat) - The unstoppable rear end-kicker. Giles (Exploration) - Finds out all the information. Willow (Magic) - Pretty much does whatever she wants (but pays for it so that magic isn't OP) Xander (Social) - Able to sneak into secret lairs under the pretense of being "just some dude". Generic Dungeon Crawl Party Fighter (Combat) - beats up enemies. Thief (Movement/Creative) - sneaks and picks locks. Magic-User (Magic Power) - Makes things happen with smarts. Cleric (Spirit Power) - Makes things happen with wisdoms. Shadowrun Archetype Party Street Samurai (Combat) - beats up high-tech enemies. Face (Social) - carouses with high-tech people. Hacker/Decker (Creative/Exploration) - hacks things and find things out using high-tech. Rigger (Creative/Movement) - hacks things and drives using high-tech. Adept (Combat/Magic) - fights and does some magic. Magician (Magic) - does weird things with magic. ... and so on. If we can manage to whittle down combat to 30 minutes and create compelling, all-inclusive non-combat scenes of about the same length, then forming such a party means that everyone participates and the players swap off who gets the spotlight over the course of an
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Jun 9, 2013 13:42
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GAME MASTER SURPRISE I know that I have stated it before, but I feel so strongly about it that it deserves repeating: I believe that an important element of the fun and excitement of a work of fiction - or a game that plays out a work of fiction - is the UNexpected. So far, our characterization of Combat Scenes has focused on expected values and outcome tables and justification for how easily estimable action results will be for players so that they don't have to do intensive mathematical analysis to pick their next move. That is good for curing analysis paralysis, but predictability does not make for fun. The predictable side of all this is more important for the GM so that antagonists and encounters of a reasonable difficulty can be improvised on-the-spot. Outcomes are only easily estimable if players have perfect information, and this is why I believe it is important that antagonist stat blocks be hidden from players and more variable than traditional D20s. It is very important that the GM reserve the right to surprise the players. Those unexpected moments where the GM throws a curveball at the players - revealing that they are in deeper than they thought, or in a totally different situation than they thought - create tension and excitement as the players shift to adapt to the new information (which shouldn't be too hard given how easy we are making "informed optimization"). Along with hidden stat blocks, we also want to give the GM the fiat to surprise the players with fictional elements that cannot be looked up and meta-gamed. Meta-game foreknowledge destroys the dramatic tension of encounters with the unknown. The GM should be given enough leeway to create a gimmick monster-of-the-week or set-piece combat that requires some mid-scene reality testing (with difficulty adjusted down to accomodate for the extra effort). This is why we have built the idea of risky "reality testing" into our assumptions about Combat Scenes, as the GM's liberty to surprise should be built into all scenes. Exploration scenes become boring when it is just a game of "apply a predictable maze-search algorithm". Social scenes become boring when the NPCs have no hidden motives, agendas or bargaining chips. Movement scenes become boring when every apparent hand-hold is reliable.
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Jun 9, 2013 23:19
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COMBAT CHOICES Back in the section "Player Choices" we discussed that we don't want players making choices towards optimization; we would rather have them making choices about their character's identity, their relationships to the world and other characters, and about whether or not to take risks. All of the game mechanics that we have been discussing so far work towards this objective. - Streamlined and unified Skill Conflicts make optimization choices easy - Take A Risk mechanics always make risk taking tempting (positive EV) - Skills let players choose scene-based agency and fiat - "Cross Skill Action" is a means of rewarding character-based moments - "Reality Testing" is a means of exploring relationship to the world How do these elements combine to give players interesting things to think about and decide during combat? Let's consider the flow of combat in the three stages that we discussed earlier: an early stage exploring relationships, a mid stage involving some simple strategic decisions, and a late stage of risk-taking and character moments. The choices available to players in the early stage combat would be how to go about sizing up the opposition (who attacks who), whether to engage immediately or to move towards advantageous position, and perhaps whether to explore and modify the battlefield to create advantages (turn over tables? start fires?). This gives players an opportunity to both make character-based decisions about how to make an approach as well as discuss some simple party-based strategies. The end result of early stage combat will be the discovery of relationships to the antagonists (how tough each one is) as well as the environment (what might be used for advantage). Also remember that we are going to be granting player fiats, so early stage might be a time when players declare beneficial elements of the fiction. The choices available to players in the mid stage of combat would be how to act on the information that has been established and perhaps how to respond if the GM throws some curveballs. The idea is that optimal target prioritization (or in the case of single target, maybe means of attack) should be easy to figure out following early combat, so then characters can break out the big guns - scene-specialists unloading on primary targets and choosing whether or not to take early risks or use up per-scene powers; and others will choose whether to focus fire, engage with secondary targets, or take other fiction-based actions to help their allies gain advantages. When choosing to take risks, players will be describing their actions in attempts to justify fiction-based advantage. The dramatic tension should peak in late stage combat as most get eliminated and things become swingier with fewer discrete dice rolls. Late stage combat should provide many opportunities for dramatic character moments, with remaining players making choices about using per-scene powers, frantic descriptions of fiction-based advantage, and attempting character-based cross-skill actions. Of course the GM will be encouraged to more liberally grant advantage and cross-skill action in the late game, creating more memorable character moments and slanting the odds in the player's favor.
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Jun 10, 2013 18:26
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Paolomania posted:NO COMBAT BALANCE!? I don't think it's a good idea to eschew equal participation in different scene types in order to achieve an extremely generalized concept of genre emulation, for several reasons. First: your game assumes too much about playstyle right off the bat. In order for this asymmetry to equalize over all scene types, the DM has to make a conscious effort to include an equal number of each scene type. Assuming that each scene type is ~30 mins long like you want and an average session is ~3 hours, you have 6 required scenes. Assuming a Combat/Exploration/Social scene type divide, that means you need to have 2 of each to have participation parity. It's a bit much for the DM to shoehorn those requirements into an adventure, much less a session, and especially when you have situations like a standard dungeon-crawl (very little opportunity for Social scenes). Second: does this mean that this game is supposed to have the players from the start assign roles to each other just to cover all the basics? What if two players are combat specced, but the other two made Exploration and Social characters? Do we have a 2:1 ratio of combat to the other scene types? Again, this method of design assumes too much of the group's playstyle and character choices. It also makes it so that the non-specced players are given a reason to zone out when it's "not their scene type," when they should be just as engaged as everyone else at the table. Third: your examples for scenes are pretty vague. When you have "magic" as a specialty, it doesn't necessarily tell me anything about what scene types the character is specced for. If you're going to silo entire characters to specialize in a scene type, then you need to have a clear idea of what constitutes each scene from the beginning. Fourth: It's boring and encourages lazy design. When only one character in a party is defined as "good at combat," that limits the kind of group power synergy that makes a scene fun to play with in a group, since the other characters will either have less options or weaker abilities in the scene. Besides, combat is an entire facet of the game– it's not something that you can just say someone's "better at" when there's so many ways to have characters fight in a good system. D&D4E makes all players equally useful in combat, despite the classes playing radically different. Relative equality in player power and group synergy make for more compelling gameplay.
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Jun 10, 2013 19:15
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Thanks for the feedback! Challenging ideas and their rationale is important for making them better. I'm going to come in hard in defense of where I am at, but please rebut if you think the defense is weak. Let's dialogue.Spiderfist Island posted:I don't think it's a good idea to eschew equal participation in different scene types in order to achieve an extremely generalized concept of genre emulation, for several reasons. quote:First: your game assumes too much about playstyle right off the bat. In order for this asymmetry to equalize over all scene types, the DM has to make a conscious effort to include an equal number of each scene type. quote:Assuming that each scene type is ~30 mins long like you want and an average session is ~3 hours, you have 6 required scenes. Assuming a Combat/Exploration/Social scene type divide, that means you need to have 2 of each to have participation parity. It's a bit much for the DM to shoehorn those requirements into an adventure, much less a session, and especially when you have situations like a standard dungeon-crawl (very little opportunity for Social scenes). quote:Second: does this mean that this game is supposed to have the players from the start assign roles to each other just to cover all the basics? What if two players are combat specced, but the other two made Exploration and Social characters? Do we have a 2:1 ratio of combat to the other scene types? Again, this method of design assumes too much of the group's playstyle and character choices. quote:It also makes it so that the non-specced players are given a reason to zone out when it's "not their scene type," when they should be just as engaged as everyone else at the table. I do admit that this justification relies heavily on the as-yet unproven ability to provide compelling non-combat encounters, so until I prove that the other scene types can use similar functions for engagement, I will just have to say that I owe proof on this. quote:Third: your examples for scenes are pretty vague. When you have "magic" as a specialty, it doesn't necessarily tell me anything about what scene types the character is specced for. If you're going to silo entire characters to specialize in a scene type, then you need to have a clear idea of what constitutes each scene from the beginning. Creative is iffy, but as the "tinker" skill it is meant to cover object-interaction (as opposed to environment discovery) so set-piece puzzles, traps, feats of artistry and engineering, etc. are meant to highlight characters of this type. If Creative Scenes ultimately don't make sense (perhaps being a proper subset of Exploration) then the skill could be reconsidered as one of high cross-skill utility or perhaps eliminated altogether. As for Magic, Psionics and the like, as touched upon briefly in the "Magic-in-Combat Preview" discussion section, such 'supernatural' skills are intended to be "reliable cross-skill actions with Stress cost". So selecting Magic doesn't mean that there is a specifc type of "Magic Scene", it just means that the character has the flexibility to do magic effects in various types of scenes, but only by self-immolating in the process. quote:Fourth: It's boring and encourages lazy design. When only one character in a party is defined as "good at combat," that limits the kind of group power synergy that makes a scene fun to play with in a group, since the other characters will either have less options or weaker abilities in the scene. Besides, combat is an entire facet of the game– it's not something that you can just say someone's "better at" when there's so many ways to have characters fight in a good system. quote:D&D4E makes all players equally useful in combat, despite the classes playing radically different. Relative equality in player power and group synergy make for more compelling gameplay.
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Jun 10, 2013 20:43
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POINT BUY Since we are talking specialization, I think its a good time to lay down the point-buy systems that I am thinking of. The proposed system will result in an approximation of an N-dimensional vector of length L, where N is the number of stats and L is the maximum individual stat for the given allocation. This approximation holds true for all N and L, so rebalancing to different breakdowns of Abilities or Skills or adding different genre-specific Skills won't be too hard. Points: Points of various sorts will be the basic currency with which players make the rough character decisions that we call Abilities and Skills (we in all cases will refer to currency-like resources as 'Points' - Stress Points, Karma Points, Ability Points, etc). An initial allocation of Ability Points and Skill Points will be given for each character, with further points awarded over the course of an adventure (progression discussion later). Ability Points may be used to increase Abilities at any time. Skill Points may be spent to increase Skills at any time. Marginal Point Buy: Scores are increased one step at a time up to some maximum score. The point-cost of going from one score to the next is equal to the new score. Thus going from +0 to +1 costs 1 point, +1 to +2 costs 2 points, +2 to +3 costs 3 points, and so on. The total point cost of Score L is L(L+1)/2. This makes a score of L cost on the order of L-squared, which leads to the 'vector approximation' description. This scheme also slightly advantages spreading your points out, as the average cost-per-point goes way up as you invest further and further into an individual score. Point Allotments: The total number of points given to each player will depend on how much stratification we want between scores and where we want the maximum scores to be. Just to play with some numbers, we have already thought about a maximum score of +4 for Abilities (maybe some other thing like +5 is really what we want), so if we give players say 10 points to start and 10 points over the campaign, starting builds could look like (4,0,0,0,0,0), (3,2,1,0,0,0), (2,2,2,1,0,0), (2,2,1,1,1,1) and ending builds could be various things like (4,4,0,0,0,0), (3,3,3,1,1,0), (2,2,2,2,2,2), etc. depending on how much the player wants to generalize. Playing with some skill numbers, if we go for a target max of +20 (not that we will, +10 might serve our purposes just fine), with a max level allotment of 330 points we would get builds like: Specialist: Primary +20, Secondary +15 Balanced Specialist: Skill +18, Skill +17 Three-way Utility: Skill +15, Skill +14, Skill +14 Full Generalist: all skills +10, plus genre-magic +10 Non Magic Generalist: all skills +11 Also keeping in mind that these number don't grant linear increases in power, as relative skill is all that matters, more than a 5-point spread gives no extra bonus and the max swing is from -2 to +2 expected effects. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jun 11, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 23:50
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Intentions of Point Buy System: Skills were originally conceived as "class levels in encounter types" or "BAB in different situations". In this frame, the intention of the point buy system is to allow for non-additive multiclassing. In this way, a "multi-class" character is rewarded by having a greater total sum of "class levels". At present, this might not seem like much of an advantage because it means you will never end up on top of Skill Conflicts, but way back 18,000 words ago I mentioned that taking skill would grant player fiats. So a multi-class character will be on the downside of more NPC conflicts, but have a much larger set of narrative tools to turn the story by fiat.
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Jun 11, 2013 13:15
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A few one-off asides: What is a wipe?: A significant portion of damage dealt during combat has been characterized as 'stress' rather than 'injury' and elimination from combat has been characterized as "character disabled" rather than "character dead". This leads to the idea that a "Total Party Disable" (aka a 'wipe') does not necessarily equate to "End of Narrative". A wipe could easily lead to a left-for-dead situation, as antagonists might be in a hurry, or to a captured-for-torture scenario, as the malicious might rather inflict more pain on the party then end their suffering. Is everything a Dramatic Scene?: No. 'Dramatic Scene' is our name for a sub-unit of the narrative that represents a high-stakes/high-fidelity event where the players are working against present dangers and antagonists. This chunking helps the GM plan and improvise thematic challenges, and helps our design balance an economy of health, powers and other resources. Depending on the approach that players take to a campaign, much if not most of gameplay might be spent in 'Narrative Scenes'. Although they encompass lower-drama events, Narrative Scenes are not necessarily free of danger and conflict. Players might wish to punch-out a body guard, or sweet-talk a city official, or sneak into someplace they are not supposed to be. Such one-off dangers and conflict may or may not involve rolling dice, depending on The Expected Thing and the player's inclination to Take A Risk, but certainly there is no need to stand up a full Dramatic Scene in order to handle such events. The point of narrative scenes is to keep the story moving and to find which way it is going, allowing such one-off events to divert the story for good or bad without the GM laying down a full high-crunch encounter. This narrative/dramatic scene divide also can be used to make certain powers 'narrative only' (rituals, etc) or 'dramatic only' (Voltron always waits till poo poo hits the fan to Form Blazing Sword).
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Jun 11, 2013 22:48
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HAZARDS AND REACTIONS Reactions are the "Defy Danger" or "Saving Throw" of this system. Some hazard threatens a character, the GM prompts for a fictional response, the player chooses to take the default Expected Thing (not likely) or Take A Risk (positive EV!) to reduce or eliminate the consequences. Some hazards might have the same expected thing for all characters, some might have an associated Skill that lets some characters have a better Expected Thing than others (mathematically the equivalent of a one-time conflict with an antagonist where player has advantage). NON-COMBAT SCENES A major goal of this system is overall de-emphasis of combat encounters. This idea will never work without compelling non-combat encounters, and it remains to be proven that this can be done. I believe that it can, and although we do not have the decades of proof as with RPG combat. If combat is a high-fidelity mini-game within a larger game, then other Dramatic Scenes should be given the same treatment. If "try to throw one punch" is too little for a combat encounter, then "try to disarm one trap" is too little for a non-combat encounter. Dramatic Action: Remember that our characterization of a 'scene' does not include a notion of strict turn-taking and time-steps. This will serve us well when thinking about action in non-combat scenes, as the flow of events will generally be more fluid than a tactical combat. We also must keep in mind our goal of roughly 30-minute duration (excluding table talk) for every Dramatic Scene, and with our current assumptions about turn-time that means a target granularity of about 20 total actions. From the beginning I have characterized non-combat encounters as various types of 'scenes' rather than 'skill challenges'. This is specifically because for design ideas we will be drawing from dramatic non-combat scenes in novels, movies, television, and other fiction. As we develop the ideas for non-combat Dramatic Scenes, we want to think about various iconic scenarios, how to create a system that enables their emulation, and how to structure them such that everyone participates. I have already discussed a few design goals for each scene type back in the "SCENES/ENCOUNTERS: Design Goals" discussion section, now it is time to brainstorm some iconic scenes: ICONIC MOVEMENT SCENES These scenes involve moving through the environment, and the environment itself serves as the primary antagonist. Chases: The party chases one or more antagonists through a difficult environment. Could be a foot-race through a market, or car chase on city streets, horses in wilderness, etc. At risk are campaign goals attached to the fleeing parties, and the long-term resource cost of injury in the pursuit. There may be strategic decisions to make about trying to head-off or divert the direction of the chase, or choosing match-ups for chasing down multiple targets. The antagonists and environment will likely provide many hazards along the way. Treacherous Climb: The party must make a dangerous ascent. Whether it is a cliff-face or a Mako Reactor, at risk will be campaign goals attached to the opportunity-cost of taking a different route and the long-term resource cost of injury. There should be strategic decisions about routes to try and there will be hazards or antagonists providing resistance. Severe falls should happen after cascading consequences provide the party with chances to save eachother. Bridge of Khazad-dum: You know the story: party must flee through treacherous/crumbling environment with imminent doom right behind them and under heavy pressure from hazards and antagonists. Lots of opportunities to save eachother's necks. ICONIC SOCIAL SCENES These scenes involve Undercover Party: The party has to infiltrate a high-society gathering of diplomats, dignitaries or other socialites in order to achieve some campaign goal. At risk will be immediate consequences for discovery as well as injury to relationships and campaign goals. Might involve assuming identities, creating distractions, working to separate certain NPCs, etc. 'Stress' resources will likely indicate how much suspicion the players are generating. The Trial: Whether involving public officials or just public finger-pointing, the party must persuade a jury, panel or crowd in a high-pressure situation with a time limit. At risk are campaign goals and character relationships. There will perhaps be many people that need persuasion, and simultaneous circles of debate and discussion. The party might strategize about who to work on persuading, how to divide group effort if multiple parties need to be worked on, perhaps creating distractions in order to meddle with evidence, etc. Council Session: The party must work to prevent a meltdown at a council session while also pushing for their own aims. Whether the scale is neighborhood, city, or region, this scene involves mediating between NPCs with disparate interests and factional allegiances. At risk are not just character relationships, but the direction of the story as factions choose major course of action. The party must choose who to side with, who to appease, who to take aside and deal with individually, etc. Deals must be struck and concessions made before stresses run too high and the whole thing melts down and aggravates local conflicts rather than pushes towards the party's goals. ICONIC EXPLORATION SCENES These scenes are all about noticing details and discovering information about the environment. The main antagonist is what is unknown, with the actions of the party determining whether what they find out is helpful or hurtful to their aims. Forensic Investigation: The party arrives at a location following some significant event and must determine what happened. Time pressure forces them to search in parallel or risk losing a campaign goal. At risk is the nature of the information that they discover (searching is good/bad not pass/fail!) and the implications that it has for the at-risk goal and for the future course of the story. Wilderness Search: The party is combing a dangerous wilderness area for something that is hiding. Sticking together is safer but covers ground very slowly. How long will the search go on and how dangerous it will be will largely depend on their approach. Even though they will likely find their quarry, it might be at great personal cost. Library Research: The party must dig through cryptic and difficult archives of information in parallel in order to find the answers they need in time to use them. Exploration-combat vs. books. I swear we can make it work. At risk is discovering (i.e. adding) more difficulties and complications for the campaign as well as any time-sensitive campaign goals. ICONIC CREATIVE SCENES Build Defenses: The party must improvise the construction of various defenses in order to abate an incoming threat. Construction might be risky and involve handling hazardous materials. The party will have to come up with ideas and divide work amongst the players in order to finish in time. At risk are the campaign goals that they are guarding and the difficulty of the unmitigated threat. Puzzle Room: The workings of some mad engineer have created a dangerous area that the party must manipulate in order to achieve some goal. The various machinations will have to be discovered, manipulated and jury-rigged perhaps simultaneously by various party members in order to make everything work. The dangers of the room stress the party as they prod and poke to figure it out. Merry Troupe: The party for some campaign goal has to provide a compelling entertainment production for a crowd, perhaps as a large-scale diversion for a sneaky PC, or perhaps to just please some NPCs. A hastily improvised production involving some fast script writing, costuming, set design, rigging and of course acting. If all else fails, send Baldanders out rampaging into the audience.
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Jun 12, 2013 20:09
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SOCIAL SCENES: Case Study I run a Pathfinder campaign that I frequently use as a test lab for design ideas. Most recently I have been running it as a completely no-prep improvised campaign. In last night's session, the party was returning to a friendly city. The city was under the imminent threat of an approaching colossal construct of war. Those of you familiar with DungeonWorld-style campaign design might recognize the colossal construct as a "Danger" on the "current adventure Front" (I have been using DW-style Fronts for some time in this campaign). You might even recognize that this as a "Danger" that has moved very close to its "Impending Doom" - in this case because the party ignored several "Grim Portents". DW-style campaign design (effectively modeling campaign-level agents as simple state-machines) are great at managing the macroscopic direction of the campaign. Unfortunately, this do not help us when trying to improvise the "crunchier-than-DW" encounters that many players want. Our breakdown of scenes into types and thinking about iconic scene-emulation is specifically about helping a low-prep or improvisational GM to quickly scaffold an interesting scene, focused around a mode of interaction. I feel that this can be more helpful than abstract principles that present options but not advice on a direction. Upon arriving in the threatened city, the party, as well-respected heroes, decided to check in with the local Lord to discuss a plan of action. Whenever the players want to do something, the GM's first thought should be "how can I make this interesting?" If we were talking DW, the edict is "fill the character's lives with adventure", but the answer has less direction. In my case, after the party decided to go talk to somebody, I instantly thought "Social Scene". This would not merely be some one-off roll to see if the party gets what they want. Turning a meeting with an NPC into a full on "Social Scene" following our design had some immediate implications: dramatic tension, stakes involving relationships, multiple interests at odds with each other, simultaneous overlapping social situations, and plenty of opportunity for character moments. I began constructing the scene on-the-fly. I started by introducing a crowd of conflicting interests: the party arrived in the offices of the regent to find him holding an emergency council with the leaders of the most powerful local factions. Then I set up some high stakes (facilitated by the 'Danger'): the meeting was at an impasse and at risk of dissolving, leaving the city in chaos in the face of an existential threat. While the players discussed their approach with eachother, I occasionally interjected with dialogue from various faction leaders, setting the party's various allies in town against eachother based on conflicting interests - adding tension to the scene and additional stakes in the form of choosing allegiances. The party begins interjecting into the meeting, taking a defer-to-the-expert approach of letting their 'Face' (Theif) do all the talking. The Face begins alleviating some of the conflict and instantly I think: now is the time for a curve-ball. I add some additional high-stakes overlapping action in the 'Social Scene' vein. I give it the form of a simultaneous social challenge: town guards arrive at the lord's offices to inform him that a crowd seeking to flee on ships is forming down at the docks and is on the verge of turning into an angry mob. The lord's man-at-arms departs to address the situation and to show the party that this is a serious deal. Now the party is put in a situation of prioritizing challenges and dividing effort, they choose to leave the 'Face' and one other (Wizard who thankfully didn't have something like Mass Charm memorized) at the meeting and to send some less socially-apt firepower (Ranger and Cleric) down to the docks. Down at the docks, the situation is, of course, dire. The man-at-arms is standing on top of a crate with a few city guards around him trying to shout down a crowd of several hundred panicked and angry citizens. I introduce some stakes via shouts overheard by the party members from the back of the crowd: the fundamental authority and justness of the lord and faction leaders is being called into question by their inaction, the crowd is near rapidly tipping over into disorganized mob (the resulting panic and chaos in the city would most certainly ensure that it is laid waste by the colossus), the life of the man-at-arms (a very party-friendly NPC) is in immediate danger, and also the public image of the party as heroes of the people is on the line if they bring down hard crowd control. I won't tell you how the rest of the session played out, but let me just say: screw one-off diplomacy rolls. There is an unexplored world out there of rich non-combat encounters and this is exactly the type of thing that I want this game to support with not just fiat, but mechanics as well.
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Jun 13, 2013 20:37
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SOCIAL SCENES: Core Mechanics Combat scenes are well-known design territory, however the space of designing for, generating and running non-combat scenarios is not so well explored. Can social scenes be mapped to a form of "social combat" and does such a construction lead to a play-style that satisfies our design goals? Is a more free-form improvisational approach preferable? How do we avoid a reduction of social encounters to "defer to the expert"? Core Mechanics: The "core mechanics" that we are building the system upon are The Expected Thing (take a default outcome) and Take A Risk (roll dice to try for a better outcome). The Expected Thing is defined by genre expectations as moderated by the GM (and as meta-moderated by the players), and further influenced by expectations established by the acting character's Skills (I punt on further Skill details for now). Take A Risk involves rolling d20 (with 'advantage' granting an ability bonus), and yields a better expected outcome but at risk of consequence. Let's review an abstract Take A Risk table: pre:D20 Roll | Result ------------+------------------ result < 5 | much worse result < 10 | worse result = 10 | mixed better/worse result > 10 | better result > 15 | much better ------------+------------------ natural 1 | extra consequence natural 20 | extra benefit Advantage: Our advantage mechanic also easily works on such acts. If the interaction is well role-played then the GM should grant an appropriate Advantage. CHA seems like a natural fit, but one could imagine a player using a highly rational argument to gain an INT bonus, or some Zen Koan to get a WIS bonus, STR to intimidate, and so on. This keeps our design goal of Advantage being a flexible reward for good role-playing. Social Conflicts: Recall that our idea for Conflicts is resolving what happends when characters are actively working in opposition. In a social context, this would not mean simply arguing opposite sides in a long discussion. The granularity of a Conflict is much tighter. A Social Conflict encompasses a single exchange amidst a larger interaction - perhaps a trade of witty insults, or an attempt to shout over eachother, or who persaudes the crowd over a rhetorical point. Similar to Combat Conflicts, the expected outcome (before any dice rolling) of a Social Conflict is defined by the relative Social Skill of the characters. Let's review an abstract outcome table for conflicts: pre: Relative Skill | Expected Thing
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-5 or less | greatly in opponents's favor
-1 to -4 | in opponent's favor
equal | stalemate
+1 to +4 | in actor's favor
5 or more | greatly in actor's favor
Take A Risk: character with advantage, otherwise the acting character.
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Jun 14, 2013 22:59
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SOCIAL SCENES: Design Analysis of Combat: In order to come up with a design for social scenes, let us first look at combat - our "known quantity". Combat is fundamentally resistance to the characters' goals that takes the form of one or more antagonists. Typically, the resistance is overcome when the players have caused enough stress and damage to each antagonist to eliminate them from the narrative. The narrative elimination of each antagonist is thus a sub-goal that has been introduced along the way towards achieving the characters' goals. Combat is more than just a one-time d20 roll because these "sub-goals" introduced by the scene involve multiple risks and decisions. Viewing a scene in general as "one or more scene goals that involve multiple risks and decisions" will help us achieve the similar-to-combat fidelity that we are looking for. Whether or not our non-combat scenes end up looking like combat with attacks and hit points, this framing will help us map scene ideas onto the familiar territory of combat to gain intuitions about a scene's quality through its structure. E.g.: "This one-goal skill challenge is like a fight against a big-bad with no powers", "This exploration scene is like fighting a hallway of enemies one-at-a-time", "This social scene is like punching out three minions". Stress and Goals: A major reason that an eliminating antagonist in combat is more than a single-roll affair is that it has a level of health, and in our case stress as well, that requires multiple actions to exhaust. An antagonists health and stress can be looked at as a measure of progress towards a goal - in this case progress towards eliminating the enemy from the narrative. In trying to match the fidelity of combat, we can reuse this mechanic of measuring progress by attaching a Stress target to abstract scene goals that require more than an action's worth of effort. Thus if "persuade a crowd of hundreds to your cause" is a scene goal, the overall progress towards persuasion could be represented as a Stress total. Even in the case of persuading an individual character, it might be good to attach a scene-specific stress level that represents progress towards winning them over that is separate from their "well being" Stress level. Stress and Consequences: On the character level, we will still want Stress accumulation to mean "progress towards temporary narrative elimination". In a social scene this might mean that the character has overstepped their bounds, convinced the audience that they are deceitful or disrespectful, had their temper get the best of them, or achieved some other dramatic (remember these are meant to be high-drama scenes!) social disgrace that renders their efforts ineffective for the remainder of the scene. Character-specific Stress buildup can be used to represent the potential down-side for lying, challenging etiquette, or other 'risky' social actions. Also, as with scene goals, Stress can be attached to abstract scene consequences. In this way, we might represent an antagonists' contrary efforts to persuade a crowd as a Stress level (I argue that two Stress levels is better than a tug-of-war abstraction as two ever-increasing numbers will reach end-of-scene in a much more predictable fashion), or we might represent "party-wide contempt of court" as a Stress level. Attaching Stress levels to multiple goals and multiple consequences in the same scene could be one technique to mechanically represent overlapping action and tactical trade-offs in a non-combat scene. Options other than Stress: It is also possible to run non-combat encounters in the more traditional freestyle role-playing fashion. If a GM is able to create a compelling scene with dramatic tension, strong relationships and opportunities for character moments without using the Stress mechanics, then there is no reason to force it. These ideas about Stress are just a way to facilitate the GM in achieving the right degree of scene crunch and dramatic tension by framing things in terms of goals that will require a certain amount of effort and risk taking to achieve. They will also help us as designers to quantify crunch and risks as we formulate how to build some iconic scenes.
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Jun 15, 2013 15:46
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Paolomania posted:Over 17,000 words later Wilson...  I WILL END YOU
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Jun 15, 2013 17:49
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Winson_Paine posted:
Fixed!
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Jun 16, 2013 16:20
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(OP Updated with reorganized discussion notes!) SOCIAL SCENES: Modeling Social Scenes Now that we have laid a groundwork of mechanics, let's consider how to model the iconic Social Scenes mentioned previously: Undercover Party, Trial and Council Session. As we model these scenes, we should keep in mind the design goals that have been discussed for all scenes: - playable in 30 minutes (20 actions?) - character-driven goals and stakes - create dramatic tension and reward risk - opportunities for characterization - exercise character relationships - straightforward trade-offs, not optimization problems - multiple overlapping demands to avoid "defer to the expert" Things we wanted to specifically avoid for Social Scenes: - protracted or frivolous negotiations - social-tank the NPC until they drop the MacGuffin - reductio-ad-combatum murder hoboism These kinds of situations lack social character moments, dramatic tension and strong relationships between the characters and the world. Aside from campaign goals, good stakes for Social Scenes involve relationships: - reputation & trust - loyalties and allegiances - friendships - emotional attachments Goals and Methods: The overall goal for the scene could be anything, but the presumption we make in standing up a Social Scene is that the methods employed and challenges generated during the scene will largely be social in nature. The overall goal might not even involve a social task so long as it is surrounded by other social challenges. Creating Dramatic Tension: The most important thing we want to consider for each of the iconic scenes is how to set up dramatic tension. Abstractly, this tension will be created by putting the goals and stakes that are important to the players at risk. Social Scenes will typically have a low risk of physical harm, so we will have to put in effort into creating stakes that compel the players as much as self-preservation. Tension and Scene Goals: The immediate scene goals to be achieved will obviously be at stake. If these goals are player-chosen rather than pushed by the GM, then they will serve as even stronger motivations. However, we need to strike a balance in just what is at stake for the failure to achieve a scene goal. Our ultimate aim is to facilitate the GM and players in creating a world of drama and adventure, so having a failure in a scene end the story is too severe. Conversely (and similarly to outcomes on the level of individual action), if a goal failure is just and inconsequential event that leads to a re-try then all we have done is create an inconsequential time sink. The solution is for failed goals to create consequences that will significantly complicate the campaign. In addition, if a goal is going to be a source of any dramatic tension at all, the players must be clued-in to these consequences. Tension and Relationships: If the characters have established strong relationships with NPCs, these relationships should be put at stake. We will do this by introducing conflicts of interest, entangling allegiances, and friends at odds. The stakes for how the players handle the scene will be repercussions in relationships that they value. The implication of this is that relationship stakes, and therefore Social Scenes, more often than not will involve friendly NPCs rather than faceless NPCs or antagonists. Players won't care much about hurting a relationship with a stranger or an enemy (unless maybe it starts a war or causes some other campaign-level failure), but hopefully they will care about hurting a relationship with a friendly (or at least useful) NPC. As with goals, if the players are to feel the tension then they must know these threats exist. Tension and Identity: I still posit that a good deal of the fun in RPGs comes from the character-exploration that comes with inventing a fictional persona. This persona goes beyond the stat sheet and into the character's status and reputation in the game world. The social aspect of this identity can be put at risk to increase tension in Social Scenes. If a player wants their character to be well-respected, we add risks of ill-repute. If a player wants to be feared we add trade-offs between achieving goals and appearing too lenient. However, we do not want to totally negate the identity choices that player has made, we merely want to jab at these choices with threats of significant yet recoverable injury to these aspects.
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Jun 17, 2013 21:22
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Causing a war is not necessarily a campaign-level failure.
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Jun 18, 2013 01:16
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Paolomania posted:However, we do not want to totally negate the identity choices that player has made, we merely want to jab at these choices with threats of significant yet recoverable injury to these aspects. This is absolutely A Thing I am trying to incorporate into my current campaign, so I'll expand on it a little, then pose a question to you. One of my players mentioned as a minor goal that they wanted their family back, but felt that it was impossible. The truth of the matter is that the PC had a curable affliction and a lust for revenge that were the only things keeping him from being with his family, so I made a point of playing those aspects up. I went to lengths to explain the hurt it was causing to the people he cared about, and how all they wanted was for him to stop fighting and come home. You don't want to diminish the player's stated goal of revenge, but you should try and present alternatives. Another player was raised in an evil cult, but was "rescued" by a Knight who believed she could be redeemed. Unfortunately, he basically did this by torturing and brainwashing the evil out of her. The player felt this allowed the character to veer good or evil as the character progressed, but I felt it was too strongly slanted towards evil. So I made efforts to provide the character with a sympathetic ally would would act as a much better role model for "Good." It also allowed me a chance to introduce her (a new player into an existing campaign) to some of the existing Good NPCs and to show "there are right ways and wrong ways to be good"; it was a nice foil since one of the more sinister party NPCs explained the same thing about being evil, earlier in the campaign. My question would be this: What's a word for this? "Devil's Advocate" comes to mind, or even "adversary" (although "adversarial DM" is a thing all its own). Like, a person who is always trying to point out the things people are failing to consider, or choosing to ignore. Conscience? That's a bit loaded, too. Arbiter? I just can't think of the noun... An example is some of the discussions I've heard in religious circles, where satan is described more as pointing out the flaws of humans and questions god favouring them, arguing 'the other side' i.e. it's not so much that satan is "comic book evil" and is just out to destroy humans. I don't know if this is a helpful example for anyone, but there it is.
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Jun 18, 2013 03:28
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Captain Foo posted:Causing a war is not necessarily a campaign-level failure. (Clarification of my semantics: even though 'campaign' can be used informally to mean 'series of game sessions', my usage of 'campaign-level' is meant "in the fiction" - i.e. on the level of the overarching narrative. "The campaign" is an abstract narrative construct that happens in the minds of the players and is written down on sheets of paper. What is actually happening at the table is players participating in an extended series of game sessions, not players participating in a military campaign, thus when I say "game-level" i mean "pertaining to the experience of the players at the game table", and when I say "campaign level" I mean "pertaining to the overall experience of the characters in the fictional adventure".) Paolomania fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 16:39
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P.d0t posted:This is absolutely A Thing I am trying to incorporate into my current campaign, so I'll expand on it a little, then pose a question to you. quote:Another player was raised in an evil cult, but was "rescued" by a Knight who believed she could be redeemed. Unfortunately, he basically did this by torturing and brainwashing the evil out of her. The player felt this allowed the character to veer good or evil as the character progressed, but I felt it was too strongly slanted towards evil. So I made efforts to provide the character with a sympathetic ally would would act as a much better role model for "Good." It also allowed me a chance to introduce her (a new player into an existing campaign) to some of the existing Good NPCs and to show "there are right ways and wrong ways to be good"; it was a nice foil since one of the more sinister party NPCs explained the same thing about being evil, earlier in the campaign. However, you still have to leave it up to the player. Even if you feel that a character is "too strongly slanted towards evil", that is a player choice and should not be 'corrected'. Yes, show them the consequences and opportunity costs of their actions. Yes, give them opportunities that entice them to other paths. But - outside of creepy anti-social things not acceptable at the table - you should accept the choices the player makes. If a player want to go full-on sociopathic murder-hobo, none of your pleas to empathy will be all that compelling. This is why we look to their chosen goals and their valued relationships for compelling gameplay choices. We already know that the player values these things. We don't need to come up with things that may or may not be compelling and say "Look at the shiny! Don't you want this instead?" Why bother when we know what they are after? The direct path to interesting drama is to use the hooks we already have and expand upon them (the venerable "yes and" principle of improv). quote:My question would be this: What's a word for this?
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Jun 18, 2013 17:24
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Paolomania posted:Also good. In an extended campaign where we are not killing off player characters, having an array of NPCs for the characters to relate to and for the GM to threaten, is a vital means of giving players character choices. The fiction that the player wrote for their character was intended to allow the character to branch towards either good or evil; however, to the DM it read as though it would be highly unlikely the character would choose good, based on that fiction. So, no, I never had any intention of railroading the player in one direction. I actually was trying to "tip the scales" more into balance, but ultimately the player is the one who gets to make the choice. I also gave an in-game explanation of what I was trying to do, by having an NPC (deity) tell the character, "It is my sincerest hope, that by feeling true goodness in your life, you may at least have a choice -- a true chance to choose your own fate -- even if that means taking the choice to denounce goodness, one day." Paolomania posted:In many ways it is the GM's job to support the players' character choices by introducing antagonists, impediments and conflicts that highlight those choices. Yeah, this is totally a thing I try and do. The PCs are eventually going to achieve the things they want, it's just a matter of what do they have to overcome in order to do this (which can be material goals like getting loot or winning a fight, or emotional goals like overcoming fear or falling in love) or what they forfeit in the process (sort of the "tragic hero" route, maybe NPCs die, you win the battle but lose the war, etc.) P.d0t fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 18:10
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SOCIAL SCENES: Undercover Party Discussion We now begin exploring detailed design for Social Scenes by considering the iconic scene "Undercover Party". We won't make particular assumptions about the scene goals that the players are trying to achieve. What we are looking at here is designing how the encounter will function both narratively and mechanically. Scene Summary: "Undercover Party" involves the party infiltrating a large social event in order to achieve their goals. The context of a large party introduces a social situation with diffused focus and widely varying familiarity between guests. The main method of achieving goals in this scene is social subterfuge. Stakes: Aside from the consequences of goal failure, "Undercover Party" scenes should carry additional stakes involving relationships with NPCs and the broad reputation of the player characters. Discovery of the subterfuge or resorting to combat should have significant repercussions on relationships and reputation. These stakes can be played against the scene goals to give the players trade-offs and create tension in the scene. The implication of these stakes is that the scene should be populated with NPCs that the characters have relationships with. These relationships need not be friendly or personal, but there must be characters with at least diplomatic ties to player aligned factions. We don't want to fill the party with pure antagonists because this deflates the social risk - there are no social relations to be injured and the party does not care if they earn an enemy's distrust. A scene full of antagonists also makes reduction to combat much more tempting. In cases where the players tend towards being sociopaths (i.e. threatening their reputation and relationships yields no dramatic tension), the consequences of discovery or combat should be further obstruction to their campaign goals. In such cases, NPCs can be considered 'friendly' if they have campaign utility, so the stakes can threaten this utility. Aside from consequences for reputation and relationships, there may be some physical consequences. This is a delicate consequence to balance. If the physical consequence is not very weighty - perhaps just the ire of a few guards, or a large force of "dramatic device" guards (i.e. less than character power level) - then the social consequences of such an altercation need to be steep since there is no significant physical threat. However, if the players are resistant to social motivation, we can't just present an overwhelming force of "dramatic character" guards as that just turns the scene into "social save or die". If violence is not meant to be an option at all, then an overwhelming force of guards should be made abundantly clear to the players and the consequence of discovery should be something more along the lines of capture and imprisonment (leading to further shenanigans) rather than automatic guard agro and death. Overlapping Action: In order to avoid a situation where everyone waits outside while the 'face' of the group goes to the party, we need overlapping action that will require everyone's attention. The context of a crowded social affair gives plenty of opportunity for overlapping action as there will be many simultaneous social exchanges happening all over the party space. We would like to present the party with several simultaneous social challenges to prioritize and divide effort amongst. Aside from pursuing the primary goal of the scene, other scene goals for "Undercover Party" might be: - bantering for information about the party and its guests - distracting or occupying specific NPCs that obstruct other goals - evading or distracting specific NPCs that could identify the party - moving NPCs to different regions of the party - creating large social distractions to divert general attention - prompting NPCs into helpful actions Stress Mechanics: As mentioned previously, our proposed means of mechanically representing looming consequences is through attaching stress resources to characters and abstract goals. We have some options for how these might be used. For individual characters, stress is used in combat to indicate an approach towards temporary narrative elimination but we can also use it towards more general narrative failures. As a scene that is built around the idea of deception, player-character stress can be used to indicate a buildup of suspicion around that character. As with combat, we want to be liberally dishing out stress in response to every social challenge and every misplaced word. Once the character's Stress exceeds their capacity to keep their cool (aka their current HP), they have blown their cover. Distributing stress accumulation throughout the party thus becomes an abstraction in this scene for distributing suspicion. As with combat, we want the players riding the line of narrative elimination. When a character blows their cover, we can introduce new tension and trade-offs. The found-out character might have to duck out of the scene, or might be called-out in a highly social way. The heat on other PCs then increases and they must choose between continuing goals or attempting to help cover for their peers. For NPCs, stress levels can be used as resistance to manipulating that character. Whether the players are trying to get the NPC to fly into a fit of rage or if they are attempting to persuade the NPC to some purpose, we can work stress levels into the "social combat" framing. This is akin to an enemy in combat, where reaching 'narrative elimination' is a positive towards the party's goals. Stress on an NPC can also be used in a negative context, representing the NPC's level of frustration or suspicion. In the combat framing this would be akin to an allied NPC reaching 'narrative elimination', which is a negative. In the social case, the allegiance of the NPC is not what is important, what is important is whether or not 'social stress' is in-line with the players' goals. For abstract stress attached to goals conditions or failure conditions, we can set a stress target based on how much effort we want the condition to require. The important thing about attaching a stress number to a condition is that it gives us a way to estimate how many actions it will take. The stress mechanic also provides granularity for representing different levels of character efficacy via rolling Ability Dice to generate the stress.
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Jun 19, 2013 20:28
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Paolomania posted:SOCIAL SCENES: Undercover Party Discussion I've actually been doing some thought and prep for this kind of session in my campaign recently, and you touched on a lot of stuff that I've been working on. So, the new Regent has finally lifted the lockdown on the capitol city and wants to hold a large gala with dignitaries from all over the land. This may sound kinda weird, but I think this sort of scene needs to be very thoroughly staged to actually work, so I want to expand on that. Which kinds of people will be there: The Party In this specific campaign, the party is basically an elite mercenary group; soldiers of fortune, guns for hire, etc. The World's Greatest Detective Maybe working towards his/her own goals or working a case for someone else. Probably there to find out a specific piece of information rather than just schmooze and find the hot gossip. Assassin's Guild A group who is able to blend into any environment (including this one). Maybe they are there to get information, maybe to intimidate some high-up public officials, or maybe to pull off a heist or a hit. This sort of group is important because they should be as combat-capable as the party. If the party goes guns-blazing, there is a group there capable of making it very risky for them. Military/Police Officers These would serve a similar function to the Assassins, but would be more likely to escort party members out and/or arrest them. The Chief Constable may also be someone who is politically connected and has valuable information. Organized Crime While these folks might serve as an aggravating factor to any social interactions involving the other groups, you know they'll always have their finger on the pulse. Depending on how "old school" your particular Mafia/Yakuza is, they may abhor the thought of violence in this kind of setting; "no women, no kids" etc. A good mix of hired goons as well as wealthy "businessmen" and "lobbyists" Foreign Dignitaries This can include members of the military as well as politicians. Usually they have differing goals to the politicians who are holding the event. The party may operate in this region, but want to curry favour with the governing bodies from other regions, and this puts them all in contact. Rich People Money can get you into all kinds of places, so these types will inevitably be there. They may be able to offer work to the Party, usually that would further their own ends. Now, beyond this, you need to kinda assume that Friendly NPCs fit into one or more of those groups somehow and they will likely be in attendance. This can be for good or ill; if the party is really trying to go unnoticed, their allies may draw attention to them just by wanting to be polite and make conversation. They may also be putting themselves directly in the line of some sort of danger, thus complicating how the party will execute whatever goals they have in mind at this event. It's all the big clusterfuck where everyone gets to see who is interacting with who, but probably everyone will be most closely focused on one person or group. Different Areas to Explore: So in my particular campaign, I pictured their being a large ballroom with... ballroom dancing. Very stuffy and formal sort of interaction takes place, so PCs/NPCs who know how to waltz properly would be more effective - knowing how and when to smoothly "cut-in" and get close to a person of interest would be an asset. Probably later on in the evening, the musical selection would "loosen up" a bit, particularly since the high-quality alcohol will inevitably be flowing all night long. I also figured there would be a "smoking room" for the (particularly older or old-school) gentlemen to gather and shoot the poo poo. This sort of helps get around the necessity of "gender pairings" that comes with social dance, so if your party is a sausage fest, this is a place where you can mingle and get some info. That said, not everyone's gonna be a smoker so the scope of who you'll find there may be a bit more limited. Likewise, some other "common areas" you may want to explore might be the balcony surrounding the ballroom, the bar, whatever. Just think of the whole venue as a world with different regions that need to be populated, and think about which types of people would be in those places. P.d0t fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Jun 20, 2013 |
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Jun 20, 2013 01:48
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That is absolutely the kind of scene for which I want this system to provide a formal structure - perhaps not tactical-combat formal, but at least more formal than "role-play and eye-ball a few skill checks".P.d0t posted:I also figured there would be a "smoking room" for the (particularly older or old-school) gentlemen to gather and shoot the poo poo. This sort of helps get around the necessity of "gender pairings" that comes with social dance, so if your party is a sausage fest, this is a place where you can mingle and get some info.
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Jun 20, 2013 13:09
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SOCIAL SCENES: Undercover Party Discussion (cont) We have a situation primed for social challenges. We have stakes that are meaningful to the characters's reputation and relationships. We have multiple overlapping goals to round-out the "social challenge" into a full dramatic scene. We have mechanics that can be used to abstract progress towards failure and success. Next we must determine how it will all play out. Length Guidelines: Recall that our overall goal for scene length is around 30 minutes and that we estimated a budget of about 20 'actions' to fit this length. Especially in a free-form scene, not everything that a character says or does carries the same weight, so for these purposes we are going to equate "action" with "dramatic moment". This could mean mechanical intervention via "Take A Risk" or it could mean the player uses some fiat or it could mean some extra-descriptive role-playing. We are just using this notion of "action" to establish a granularity of game content so that we can hit our length goals and balance player involvement. Handling Overlap: In combat, whether free-form or strict-turns, the overlapping action typically comes in the form of multiple antagonists in the same area. In "Undercover Party" we are dividing action across multiple, potentially separated, areas. Splitting action into different areas has the effect of dividing a scene into several smaller vignettes, and so our action budget for the scene will also be divided between these vignettes. Even though separated, we want the action to feel simultaneous and we want the dramatic tension across the entire scene to be rising as the scene progresses. In combat this simultaneity is achieved either through turn taking or through free form GM mediation. As more of a free-form scene, "Undercover Party" will rely on the GM to mediate, cutting from vignette to vignette after playing out a bit of action. Challenge: A caper that goes off perfectly is a boring caper. Just as with combat, we design the scene such that, no matter their task, each character will be challenged, and a good number of characters will reach "narrative elimination" - in this case the point where enough heat is coming down on them that their efforts are rendered ineffective and they risk injury to reputation and relationships. Action: The moment-to-moment ebb and flow of a combat scene involves the trading of Combat Conflicts that create stress and damage. Similarly, the moment-to-moment ebb and flow of "Undercover Party" will involve the players entering Social Conflicts that generate stress both for and against them. As with combat, stress is not meant to be cleared mid-scene. This keeps the scene monotonically flowing towards resolution. As with other scenes, social role-play follows the rule of The Expected Thing, with player option for Take A Risk. Benefits and consequences of Take A Risk can involve the usual free-form narrative-shift in the general case, but for scene goals these should be represented instead as Stress effects on a relevant character or abstraction. Benefits and consequences might not be allocated in the usual way, for instance a consequence might be stress on a friendly NPC rather than stress on the acting character. Beneficial stress effects caused by a character will typically use that character's CHA Dice for the magnitude. Consequential stress effects not caused by a clear antagonist should default to some standard die such as d6. As with combat, direct confrontation with another character (friend or antagonist) that is at cross-purposes results in a Social Conflict using the relative-skill table to determine The Expected Thing, and advantage (aka option to Take A Risk) determined by circumstances (with GM liberally granting advantage for descriptive role playing).
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Jun 20, 2013 16:15
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SOCIAL SCENES: Undercover Party (cont) Scene Stages: As with combat, we break down the scene into three stages to help us conceptualize the player experience. Early stage involves scene-discovery and reality testing. Mid stage involves tactical decision making and an escalation of threat to scene stakes. Late stage involves a peak in tension as multiple characters are hitting "temporary narrative elimination" and the players must strive to create fictional justifications to gain an edge in the final outcome. Let's break down a hypothetical example: Undercover Party: 5 player group infiltrates a gathering of dignitaries for the purpose of tricking Ambassador Evil into making a public admission that he eats kittens and thereby hurting Evildonia's geopolitical position. Unknown threats to their goals will come in the form of Councilor Evil, the ambassador's advisor who typically checks him from making gaffes, and General Evil, whom the players have perviously fought and might recognize them. Round 1: The players arrive at the party and try to locate the ambassador. Their ruses are lightly tested. Oh poo poo! Its the general! (4 actions) Round 2: The party decides how to duck or distract the general. The remaining members come against high-skill resistance from the councilor. (8 actions) Round 3: The party decides how to allocate members between distracting the Councilor and chatting the Ambassador up about kittens. All vignettes are under heavy social pressure. (8 actions) Round 4: Many characters reach their stress limits, with social disgraces being made or ruses being discovered, the party may need to reallocate effort to get the gaffe out of the Ambassador. (4 actions) Round 5: The Ambassador, somewhat too loudly, declares how delicious that kitten-flambe recipe sounds. Evildonia is disgraced.
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Jun 21, 2013 00:44
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SOCIAL SCENES: Undercover Party (Cont) Challenge Math: As with combat math, we quantify goals and failures in terms of a numer of Stress Effects. To make things easier, we equate the size of a stress effect with the expected value of a middling Ability Die - i.e. the expected value of d8 - i.e. 4.5. We then quantify mechanical interventions (i.e. 'actions') in terms of a number of expected effects. We want to structure the scene such that we hit our design targets for player elimination and goal success within a roughly 20 action budget. Again we will assume that the party has a scene expert that will be assigned to the most important scene goal (in this case, the social expert or 'The Face'). For the purpose of example we will be looking at 'Ambassador Evil' example of 'Undercover Party' described above. In this example, the Ambassador should have high enough individual skill that the party cannot just 'focus fire' and get positive results. The inclusion of the Councilor and General add additional sources of stress to The Face, creating a situation where these threats must be peeled off the specialist lest the extra pressure blows his cover before the Ambassador makes the gaffe. An idea strategy heading into the party (as the players would not know the resistance ahead of time) would be to send in the non-specialists first to discover and alleviate the secondary threats so that The Face may approach the primary target unimpeded. The Ambassador will have Social Skill equal to The Face. This gives actions by the face (with advantage) an EV of 0.5, which, as with combat, we split into roughly 1 expected effect in favor and 0.5 expected effects against. We presume that the ambassador himself is not making social efforts against the face, so if we give the Ambassador a Stress limit of about 18, it should take The Face about 4 rounds to get the gaffe, over which The Face would receive about 9 stress (assuming no stress from the social threats). The Councilor will be structured as a high Social Skill agressor, similar in Social Skill to The Face. If The Face gets his attention, he will be under extra 'social attacks' that get him discovered before the task is done, so the group must determine a way to distract or divert the councilor's attention, probably sacrificing a player character from the scene in the process. The General will be structured as a moving Social Hazard that is resistant to social pressures. He will recognize the player characters after brief exposure. Being sighted by The General creates a 2-stress effect Social Hazard that generates about 1 expected stress effect after Take A Risk is accounted for. He also must be kept away from The Face in order to ensure success.
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Jun 22, 2013 15:02
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SOCIAL SCENES: Undercover Party (cont) Just a few final notes on Undercover Party: Other Options: Although we have done a breakdown of Undercover Party involving the specific objective of "Ambassador's gaffe" with specific antagonistic threats, just as with combat there are many more options and number and difficulty of antagonists and goals. The commonality of such scenes is the nature of the action and consequences: namely covert social infiltration with high-stakes diplomatic consequence. Opportunities for Cross Skill Action: Ignoring magic for the moment ("nobody is better at Social Scenes than The Face" has important implications for "mind control" spells), our rules for cross-skill actions imply that players should be able to find some unique character moments in Undercover Party regardless of their chosen specialization. A Combat specialist might try some acts of "performance combat", or might try to sabre a bottle of champagne to create a social attraction. A Movement specialist might join in a courtly dance, rotating at just the right moment to elude The General's passing glance. An Exploration specialist might use their powers of observation to notice details about a socialite's garb in order to chat them up. A Creative specialist might try to use found objects to rapidly change disguises. Each character's skill focus should be a guide to characterization, approach, and finding interesting moments regardless of scene type. Dynamic Balance and Improvisational Scene Generation: The abstract system of Risks and Skill Conflicts gives the GM and the players a simple way to estimate mechanical interactions regardless of scene type or skill. Whether the player actions involve causing Stress to antagonists and goals, or simply taking risks to cause narrative shift, the simplicity of the mechanics allow the GM to dynamically add to the scene in order to add depth and adjust balance. In the case of Undercover Party, the scene only needs a rough idea of the setting and goals to begin: The players want to embarrass the Ambassador in public and he will be at a gathering of dignitaries. The precise nature of the opposition can be unknown to both players and GM to start, and constructed on-the-fly as the party explores the gathering. Ideas like The General and The Councilor can be drawn from past encounters or can be invented on the spot. Players used to an "encounter as puzzle-solving" style of game design might balk at the idea that the scene is constructed dynamically and that the GM is adding resistance as they go. This game, as with other story games, starts with a different conception of what the fun in an RPG is. Just as we don't want action to be about the mental math of optimization problems, we don't want the overall experience of the game to be about the mental math of strategy and puzzle solving. If players want that experience there is a large space of table-top strategy games with no character-driven cruft. This game is conceptualized as "highly structured long-form Improv" and thus derives its goals directly from those of Improv theater. The point of this game is to construct interesting scenes that allow the players to explore their characters and their character's relationship to the game world. The path to this is to structure the mechanics such that they facilitate and reward narrative-focused character choices rather than intensive mental math, resource management, puzzle solving, and tactical planning.
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Jun 26, 2013 16:16
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Aside: Tonight I'm GMing the season finale of my improvisational Pathfinder campaign. The DW-style 'front' has played out nicely, with threats from a power-hungry cult and a marauding band of necromantic barbarians diverted. However, a 400-ft arboreal construct has reached its impending doom and lumbers towards the player's current city. As with the rest of the past year, I am going in to tonight's game no written encounter design and just a few ideas:
I'll probably come up with a few more rough ideas over the course of the day, but I want the players to mostly construct the scene as they go. Doing improvisational resistance allows me to target 100% of the encounter design effort to those places that they players choose to go. e: The encounter went very well. Predictably, the players came in with the time honored invisible-flying approach, but they devised a creative keg-o-napalm dive-bomb-run, so I decided to nix a hard-counter to flying. The keg-o-napalm burnt open a hole in the construct's head, beyond which was found a cockpit containing the mummified remains of four co-pilots. After the flyers tinkered around in the cockpit for a bit, utilizing their various linguistic skills to interpret the instrumentation, they realized that they needed the rest of the party up top. The remaining party members tethered themselves together and Shadow-of-the-Colossus-ed their way up the 400-ft boss, with some fun cascading failures and opportunities to save each other's necks. Once everyone was in the cockpit, the party jacked in to the construct and tried to do synchronized piloting ala Pacific Rim. Of course the construct was ancient elven, so non-elves took 1d4 non-lethal damage per turn while jacked in. I used the number of players passing a simultaneous Will roll determining the effectiveness of a maneuver, with target set so that just about everything came off clumsily. After some risky moments, the players managed to lie the colossus on the ground and exit safely. The players breathed a sigh of relief and declared the first half of this year as 'Best Season Ever'. Paolomania fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 26, 2013 16:46
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SOCIAL SCENES: The Trial Now that the picture of the social game is becoming more clear, let's move on to the next iconic Social Scene: The Trial. Not necessarily a courtroom drama, The Trial could be applied to any public, high stakes appeal to a crowd or panel. Unlike the blending and deception of Undercover Party, The Trial is about public rhetoric and extroverted persuasion. As with every other scene we make, the main design goal is to build dramatic tension via stakes that the players care about. As with all Social Scenes, the primary conflicts and challenges threatening these stakes will be social in nature. Again, these forces are not inherently antagonistic, and reduction-to-combat should be made unappealing via high social/political consequences (but I'd say not so high as to railroad). Scene Summary: The Trial revolves around the players defending some position in a court of public opinion. Working against the players is an opposition that is arguing the other side. No matter the issue at hand, it will be resolved either for or against the players by end-of-scene (remember that we want to always drive the story forward and not reach boring impasses or low-dram non-outcomes). Rhetoric Mechanics: Because of the argumentative nature of this scene, verisimilitudinously minded players might balk at any mechanical intervention in the role-played debate. However, anyone who has ever worked a crowd or done sales knows that many times persuasion is less about air tight rationality and more about presentation. The players can make just about any ridiculous claims they like and our "Expected Thing" mechanic should be heavily tempered by character Social Skill to determine the outcome rather than just "player debate skill" (sometimes socially awkward players want to be The Face). As well, our "Take A Risk" mechanic along with our "Force of Ego" ability (CHA), easily integrates with the ideas that some characters just have a mojo that make the same words more compelling. Driving Towards Resolution: Remember that we are trying to keep our scenes relatively short in length and tight in focus. If we modeled the debate as a tug of war on the crowd it would be easy to fall into over balance with randomness not pushing towards end of scene in a timely fashion, or into imbalance with drama-destroying clear movement towards one side. We instead will model the scene more as sport: each side tallies more and more points towards some limit so that there is a clearly estimable end point and drama builds as both sides close-in on their goals. Mechanically, we of course represent this as stress accumulation on two abstract goals - one in favor of the players and one against.
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Jul 1, 2013 23:44
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SOCIAL MECHANICS I punted on this earlier in the "Social Scenes: Core Mechanics" section, but I'm thinking that this topic needs a few more words lest the vague wording in the last section be taken to mean we are in a "I am the moon" situation. The root question at hand is how should a character's Social Skill interact with player skill and the rule of "The Expected Thing". To answer this question we go back to the intentions of these elements. The intention of "The Expected Thing" is that we want the game to largely cruise along avoiding mechanical intervention with players able to estimate, short of any surprises, the outcomes of their actions. In a social situation this boils down to "The genre appropriate response when X says Y to Z". The intention of Skills in general are to set default expectations in actions and conflicts, with a Skill 0 corresponding to a genre baseline for characters with dramatic agency. For Social Skill, we can assume that most genres will have a baseline where characters are able to communicate such that their statements are taken at face value, and the response will be as expected given the content of the exchange and the relationships of the characters involved. This sets a baseline expectation of a social interaction as "reception of the player's dialogue delivered at neutral face value", and sets up expectations for non-zero Social Skill values as something like "reception of the player's dialogue as delivered by the character's skill." This still leaves more precise interpretation of absolute Social Skill scores open - i.e. how much of a narrative shift does +X Social Skill give you? Combat Skill was somewhat easier as the consideration of that Skill was almost entirely in the form of Skill Conflicts, and we were mostly discussion quantizing everything as concrete effects on an opponent. To interpret the effect of a Skill Score on a more singular action, let's go back to the original discussion of Skills (way back in discussion sections 1 & 2) to see what kinds of hand-waving ideas I put out there, and maybe sharpen up the idea for Skills and their mechanics in general: - Skills set default expectations - Skills express a speciality in an encounter type - Skills define genre-relative rankings - Skill progression is on a genre-specific scale - Skills grant players narrative fiats Let's also consider some of the dimensions of "effects" that social actions can have, remembering that what this game holds important are characterization, relationships and drama: - reputation of the speaker - emotions of individual listeners - attitudes of individual listeners - mechanical CHA die effects on social goals Let's also consider a concrete case: A character in a low-fantasy genre walks up to a stranger in the street and declares "I am the moon." The Expected Thing dictates that the stranger does the sensible thing: PC: "I am the moon." NPC: "You are drunk or crazy. Get away from me." (TBC)
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Jul 8, 2013 23:24
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SOCIAL MECHANICS (cont) As you can see from the nonlinearity of the conflicts table, we are not structuring this system in a directly FATE-ish way where +1 Skill equals one 'shift'. Since we are going with D20 aesthetics, let's go along with an idea that "social effects" are roughly equivalent to "extra combat attacks", so these are things that maybe every few levels of +Social Skill you get to improve your default Expected Thing by an effect, with one extra effect being "somewhat better than baseline", a two effects being "much better than baseline". What I'm thinking right now is to separate effects into the dimensions mentioned previously and capping the "maximum shift" in each dimension at 3 or "with style" (not presuming success). In our "I am the Moon" case, The Expected Thing is fairly negative, the NPC presumes the PC is talking nonsense, has fairly low status and not trustworthy (is drunk/crazy) and is not worth of care ("get away"). Let's say that as Social Skill increases, the player selects certain aspects in which the default responses are better (remember that we are talking about setting non-mechanical expectations and default values for all of a PC's interactions with this NPC not just for the given exchange - i.e. the attitudes are shifted once from the baseline, but don't continue shifting over the course of the encounter). So perhaps the PC could choose to be more convincing, come off with better reputation, evoke more empathic responses, or instill more trust. How might these modifications of the baseline look? PC: "I am the moon." (more convincing) NPC: "I can see you are serious. You must be crazy. Let me call the authorities to take you to the asylum." PC: "I am the moon." (better reputation) NPC: "Good sir, you are drunk or crazy. I beg your pardon, but I must be on my way." PC: "I am the moon." (more empathy) NPC: "Poor dear, you are so confused! How can I help?" PC: "I am the moon." (more trustworthy) NPC: "You are clearly confused, but I can see you are harmless. What happened to you"
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Jul 9, 2013 23:23
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SOCIAL MECHANICS (cont) The Scope of Social Default-Shift: In the examples above, the "narrative shift" from the default Expected Thing is on the quality of the relationship rather than the objective interpretation of the utterance. In all cases, the NPC is doing something expected - assuming the PC is speaking nonsense. The change in the nature of the interaction is because the relationship that informs the reaction has changed. Note that this does not inherently change the NPC's personality, motivation or goals, just how that NPC connects with the PC. This is important because it hits on the idea that Social Skill is not agency-obliviating mind control. A cowardly NPC won't charge into danger just because they find the PC exceedingly trustworthy. An antagonist will not suddenly drop their goals in opposition to the player just because they find they PC's emotions highly relatable. A NPC will not suddenly accept any outlandish thing a PC says as the literal truth just because the PC speaks with total conviction. How to Apply Social Default-Shift: We could make these "default shifts" permanent adjustments chosen at chargen/level-up. So a character would choose to be always more able to garner trust than baseline, or always able to speak more convincingly. However, I think this might be too rigid and it does not have that element of players making active choices to drive the narrative. At the same time it would be inconsistent to have the relation to one NPC fluctuate wildly from moment to moment within a scene, or garner widely varying responses from different listeners. Giving the player choice of per-scene reaction adjustment would be a good compromise. So perhaps at top of scene a character starts with a certain number of unallocated social shifts that can be applied to adjust all subsequent social interactions in a certain direction for the rest of the scene. The shifts could be allocated at any time after the scene starts, letting the player dynamically choose where to put their "social effort". So a player doesn't permanently "spec" for empathy, they just choose to be more emotionally effective in a certain scene. This gives it a bit more shared-narrative flavor, with players picking how they want social interactions to go on-the-fly. I like the idea of adding an element of performance - i.e. shifts are not always "positive", they can be used to make yourself more threatening or lower status, etc. On some level this makes Social Skill something like "acting ability" as opposed to just "salesmanship" or "diplomatic acumen". So let's say that the player is allowed to pick up to a few degrees (somewhat better, much better, far better) of shifts for a scene in various dimensions: conviction - shift how others perceive the character's belief in their own words status - shift how others perceive the character's status or reputation empathy - shift how others connect with the character's emotions trust - shift how others perceive the character's trustworthiness Of course, that is not to say that the entirety of a social ruse should be up to Social Skill - we are still beholden to the rule of The Expected Thing, so if a simple disguise is all that is called for then Social Skill might not come into play. However, Social Skill can be applied to make a disguise even more effective than expected with the addition of acting skills on top of the costume. This is actually an interesting example, because The Expected Thing when wearing a disguise is largely dependent on context. Let's say a character is wearing stolen Stormtrooper armor. This costume might hold up on its own at casual glance and in brief interactions with ordinary citizens. However, in other situations it might not hold up - perhaps if the character is doing something particularly un-Stormtrooper like, or in interactions with people familiar with Stormtrooper lingo or customs. In all situations the first thing to do is lead with the fiction and let the GM arbitrate the default Expected Thing based on what makes situational sense, with the player's Social Skill effects shifting from there. In some situations, such as a direct challenge from a Stormtrooper officer, The Expected Thing might be discovery no matter how much conviction the character puts into their fake lingo.
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Jul 10, 2013 18:45
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SOCIAL MECHANICS (cleanup) Enough rambling about defaults. All that elaboration amounts to the same general position as before: GM arbitrates The Expected Thing in response to social action along genre expectations (always with meta-moderation by the players), good role-playing is thus easily rewarded by following "fiction-first" guidelines, Social Skill provides players with options for narrative shift from this default, and game cruises through non-dramatic action without need for mechanical intervention. Which brings us back around to ... Social "Take A Risk": As always, in non-dramatic events, we allow players the option for voluntary risk-taking. In a social scene, this equates to risking the overstepping of social bounds in order to press an issue. The player rolls d20 in the usual way to randomly shift the outcome (<5 much worse, <10 worse, 10 mixed, >10 better, >15 much better). This ties into our usual Advantage mechanic (establish good fiction, choose an Ability to add to your d20 roll). Limits on "Take A Risk": A main theme of this game is to cut to the dramatic moments and resolve them. Repeated "Take A Risk" on the same social agenda within a scene should not be allowed. If the shopkeep refuses to sell the dagger for half price, the scene needs to move on, the game does not need to stop so that a character can say "please? pleease? pleeease? pleeeeease?" for 20 minutes until he gets the critical-best price. Shifts and Conflicts: Social Conflicts still follow the rules of Conflicts. When two characters are acting in opposition the default outcome is determined by relative Social Skill alone (as described in the Core Mechanics section above).
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Jul 10, 2013 21:29
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SOCIAL SCENES: The Trial (cont) Returning from our mechanical aside to the topic of the iconic scene "The Trial". We now use the recent discussion to inform our interpretation of "rhetorical mechanics" - or how to deal with player skill versus character skill in a role-played debate, and how to model persuasion of crowds as stress accumulation on abstract goals. The previous discussion of framing mentioned that we want to avoid modeling the scene as "tug of war" or "series of conflicts, as these will not have too variable scene length and poor dramatic escalation. We instead chose to frame The Trial as a race: two sides independently working towards goals, each continuously making progress and tension always increasing as the opposition closes in on their goal. This is certainly a gamist framing driven by our desire to achieve certain design properties, but we can also say that our stress-goals are abstractions of things like "solidified support in the crowd" or "weight of the case built so far". The next question is how to model the moment-to-moment action. Shall we go FATE style and essentially make the stress goals into passive 'characters' with a Social Skill so that arguments are essentially Social Conflicts with this "goal character"? One of the original design goals of this game was to avoid the need for setting "difficulty targets" by just using The Expected Thing, and this smells somewhat like attaching a difficulty to a goal by calling the goal a character and calling the difficulty a Skill. Still, this is not some one-off die roll, this goal is the center of the scene mechanics and will be acted upon repeatedly, so perhaps it is not too much to ask to have some form of formal "difficulty" for a thing that is frequently used and inherently mechanical in nature (via quantification as stress). The other option is to use our recent discussion of default social effects rather than a conflict-with-fake-character. A character would just use their 'social shifts' to get a certain number of CHA dice, and roll to Take A Risk on top of that. Looking at both these options, I worry about them being too mechanics-focused. As described the only space for role-play to have an impact on either "skill vs challenge" or "default dice" is in two places: the Advantage mechanic (and then only if a player chooses to Take A Risk) and in the old Cross-Skill Action allowance. I think that I would like more space for fiction-first interpretation of the player's dialogue. This might look like relying on the GM to play the usual role of genre-moderator, the players get to apply their default Social Skill shifts in the more abstract way (i.e. on attitudes rather than mechanically), the scene proceeds as free role-play, and the GM awards CHA die rolls towards goals as a reward for good fiction. I'm not quite sure which way I want to go with this. It has generated alot of thought, but we might have to put The Trial on the back burner so we can consider some other iconic scenes.
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Jul 11, 2013 21:41
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SOCIAL SCENES: The Trial, a step back Taking a step back from mechanics, lets consider the top down scene construction of The Trial and answer some of those high level design questions. What are the goals and stakes that give it dramatic weight? What are the sources of conflict and tension for the characters? How are we achieving overlapping demands? Stakes: clearly with The Trial there is some prime mover - an person's fate (PC or NPC) or a cause to champion in a public forum. But there needs to be more on the line than just that in order to create interest and trade-offs for the players. "Tank the monolithic social goal" does not make for an interesting scene. In "trying a case" in public, the reputations of the characters needs to be at stake as well. This reputation stake will be much richer if it is not just a monolithic "public" that is viewing, but rather an audience of different factions and sentiments. In this way, to try the case is to take strong stances in public, perhaps taking sides and putting scene goals at odds with multiple factional reputations. Conflict: The inclusion of reputation stakes makes conflict sources more clear. Not only will there be the antagonists directly opposing the scene goal, but there will also be NPCs and faction crowds reacting and interjecting in attempts to sway the outcome. As with other Social Scenes, it is better that these NPCs are friendly or at least diplomatically tied to the PCs, even if they have antagonistic scene goals, in order to put prohibitive stakes on reduction-to-combat. Overlap: An orderly courtroom is a place of speaking in turn and focus on individual speakers for the prosecution and defense. Thankfully, we are going to avoid order and its inclination towards "defer to the expert". Whether The Trial is before a judge in court, a panel at a town meeting, or a mob in the street, we want emotionally charged proceedings on the verge of a meltdown. We want the kind of chaos that will require overlapping side discussions, backroom deals and factional fire fighting to go along with the main prosecution in order to keep the whole party involved.
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Jul 12, 2013 23:57
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SOCIAL SCENES: The Trial (cont) Scene Length and Stages: We consider the design of the scene in the context of our goals for length (20-40 minutes, which we estimate to be roughly 20 actions) and abstracted into three stages (early: discovery and reality testing, mid: tactical decisions and escalation, late: peak tension and character moments). Unlike "Undercover Party", The Trial is not an elimination-based scene, so we must presume that all characters will be acting throughout the scene. For the presumed 5-player party, this puts us in the ballpark of 3-4 "rounds" depending on how active the antagonistic forces in the scene are. Setup: The two sides of the central case should be made plain heading into the scene. The side of the players might be clear, or interest and tension could be added if the players have reasons for picking either side of the argument. This might come from the factional tensions that we mentioned before, but it would be better if the case had inherent tension in the form of factual ambiguity, or a tension between justice and utility. Either way, the party will enter they scene as defenders of a specific side of the case, and their side will lose if they do not act. Early Stage: The party and the opposition makes their cases and start swaying the audience to their sides (accumulating Stress on the respective independent goals). A few initial overlaps are presented that party members must be dispatched to handle while The Face tries the main case. Mid Stage: Tension builds on the main goal as the opposition continues to sway the audience. Additional overlaps come into play and the party must adapt goal priorities and effort allocations, most likely choosing to sacrifice something. Late Stage: The main case should be a race to the finish, creating opportunities for character moments by requiring players to establish good fiction and role-play in order to win their case and minimize fallout. Even so, there should have been enough tension that some personal or factional relationship is strained.
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Jul 17, 2013 16:36
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SOCIAL SCENES: The Trial (cont) Back to Core Mechanics: Returning again to the question of The Trial's mechanics let's go back to first principles. The fundamental idea of this system is to abstract a d20 framework into something that plays fast and loose like DungeonWorld. To that end, I specifically wanted to avoid putting on the GM the burden of assigning a mechanical d20 "difficulty class" or a FATE "challenge level" on many things that a character does. These things tend to wind up being arbitrary and level-adjusted anyways, so we wanted to streamline them out. Instead, our mechanic right from the get go has always been that the fiction sets the expectations, not the mechanics. The player has "Take A Risk" as a mechanical tool for influencing those expectations (essentially a DW "Defy Danger" that has been abstracted into a general purpose and voluntary "narrative risk"). In the interest of adhering to these goals of fiction-first play and simple mechanics that support rather than hinder improvisation, I am going to specifically make that call to avoid the "FATE fractal". We are going to keep the mechanical focus tight on character level agents. These abstract goals and their stress limits are not going to be treated as characters complete with Skills and conflicts resolved as per the Skill conflict rules. Every layer of detail we require for the mechanics puts more load on the GM and makes improvisation more difficult. The GM's job at on-the-fly scene construction will work much better if it focuses first on playing genre arbiter and only after the fact on playing dynamic mechanical entity constructor and balancer. The contention that has come up in this scene is the intersection of this fiction-first play-style that we would like and the mechanics of character stats such as Skills. This is not a contention that is unique to this scene, and the whole purpose of hashing through these iconic scenes is to think about these mechanics and whether they are working towards the design goals. Again lets go back to the source (back in section 2) on character stats for why we even have these artifacts: a character's selected stats are the player's identity choices, they express desires for agency within the world and relations to other characters. In our current design Abilities swing risks in the character's favor and establish magnitudes via Ability Dice and Skills set expectations in conflicts with other characters. In what has yet to be described Skills also establish expectations of performance, and Feats grant players specific licenses to modify the narrative (Feats will be our version of "Moves" or "Stunts"). Skill Expectations Sketch: I've been punting on exactly how Skills modify default expectations for a while but I think to really move forward on these scenes I've got to at least sketch it out. I've been punting for two reasons. First, the exact expectations granted by various Skill scores is highly genre-dependent. Second, we don't have firm ideas about level ranges and maximum skills. To get by these, let's proceed with an example sketch presuming a "generic high fantasy" genre with a 3.X-ish Skill range of 0 to 20. Again, rather than make big tables of difficulties or ask the GM to invent difficulties on the spot, we start with the assumption that every character can do, without risk, whatever you would expect "generic high fantasy" character to be capable of (as always this genre-expectation is moderated by the GM and meta-moderated by the players). On top of this baseline, putting points into a Skill grants a character improved performance that becomes the new "expectation" - i.e. what the character can do automatically just by player declaration. This frames increasing skill as extra "at will powers" or "special abilities" rather than "bonus on random roll" - this framing is more consistent with our goals of shared-narrative and "Skills as Class Levels". The precise definition of these improved expectations will be part of a "Genre Kit" that describes genre-specific interpretations of each Skill as well as genre-specific Feats. A Genre Kit will contain a table for each of the five Skills that describes the specific default performance. For example, in our "generic high fantasy" Genre Kit, we might have a Social Skill table that looks alot like a "Special Abilities for Class Levels in Socialite" table. (TBC)
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Jul 22, 2013 23:25
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NPC Attitudes (Quantifying Relationships): I would rather have avoided it, but since we are going the concrete rout I am going to quantify default NPC attitudes toward PCs along two axes (which happen to line up with our alignment axes): sympathy and trust. We do this so that we can concretize “social effects” and “social level advancement”. For both sympathy and trust we are just going to apply our usual range of “very bad, bad, neutral, good, very good”. Default Attitudes: Every NPC has sympathy and trust attitudes towards the players. By default these are both neutral, but the fiction may dictate otherwise. For instance, reputation or factional allegiance might shift default attitudes for better or worse. Also, an established relationship or shared experiences with a specific NPC overrides this default as the history with that NPC grows. Effect of Attitudes: Attitudes do not affect NPC goals nor the mechanics of social conflicts. An antagonist will not switch sides just because they think you are charming. It will not become mechanically easier to deceive a high Social Skill NPC just because they had preconceptions that you were an upstanding citizen. The purpose of attitudes is to quantify social opportunities. An antagonist that is sympathetic towards a player might be willing to talk before resorting to combat, or more willing to make treaty with a trustworthy player. More trusting NPCs might follow a player's plans or more sympathetic NPCs might be more willing to give a player aid. Anyways, this attitude stuff is just a set up so that we can get to … SOCIAL SKILL ADVANCEMENT SKETCH The following is a hypothetical advancement table for Social Skill. It just sets up a schedule of selecting "Shifts" and "Feats". Shifts change default expectations about how a character relates to the game world. Feats allow the player to make declarations and additions to the game world. Both of these affect the fiction directly without randomness or mechanical intervention. We continue to leave the randomness as the player's option to "Take A Risk" on top of The Expected Thing. pre:Social Skill | Advancement
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0 | Genre Default
1 | Social Shift
2 | Social Feat
3 | Social Shift
4 | Social Feat
5 | Social Shift
6 | Social Feat
7 | Social Shift
8 | Social Feat
9 | Social Shift
10 | Social Feat
SOCIAL SHIFTS SKETCH: Social Shifts improve The Expected Thing in social interactions (i.e. not conflicts). These shifts apply to default attitudes before any other fiction is considered. Sympathetic (Social Shift, max 3) - Others find you easy to relate to. Every time a character takes this shift, each NPC’s default sympathy towards that character improves by one. Trustworthy (Social Shift, max 3) - Others find you trustworthy. Every time a character takes this shift, each NPC’s default trust towards that character improves by one. SOCIAL FEATS SKETCH: Situationally allow the player to make socially-themed declarations in the game. Like *World moves, but without randomness and always focused on either adding story elements or creating character moments. Below is a highly preliminary and incomplete list of ideas for Social Feats. I Know Just The Person (Social Feat, once per Narrative Scene) - Whether it is a question that needs to be answered or an item that needs to be procured, whenever you are in a city or town you know someone that can help. Name and describe the NPC, where in town you can find them, and then pick one: - They are an old friend. They will be indirectly helpful and can be called on again in the future. - They owe you a favor. They will be very helpful with this one thing, but thats it. A Friendly Face (Social Feat, once per Social Scene) - A old friend steps forth from the crowd. Although not in a position of authority, this person has some pull with the crowd. Name and describe the NPC, why they are close to you and why they are here. The friend is added to the scene as a friendly NPC. Your Reputation Precedes You (Social Feat, once per Social Scene) - An NPC that you have just met has already heard of your exploits. Pick one: - They relate to a particular event, improving your emotional relation - They admire a particular action, improving your trust relation
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Jul 27, 2013 04:24
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Discussion of Sketch: This is the first substantial look that we have taken at how skill advancement works outside of Conflicts. The advancement chart set up a genre-neutral schedule for advancement by selections from two categories of things called "Shifts" and "Feats". These categories of advancement are meant specifically to address our design goals such as "low mechanical overhead", "estimable mechanics", "progression as increasing shared narrative", "no fiddly bonuses", "simple charop", etc. Of note is that both of these operate on the fiction directly, either modifying expectations or adding story elements. Neither one is used to directly give bonuses, maximize dice, impact action economy, or other mechanical effects. This is an important distinction between this system and its inspirations. Shifts: Shifts are permanent improvements to the character's Expected Thing. Here I use the FATE terminology even though FATE "shifts" are instance bonuses because it evokes this sense of "movement from expectation". Our Shifts are a "passive fiat" that give the character license to achieve certain things without risk. (Remember that we make risk-taking optional yet slanted in the player's favor.) In the case above, a character with several Social Shifts in "Trustworthy" can just walk into a room of otherwise suspicious NPCs and earn their trust. Shifts in Some Heartbreaker are contrasted against the more specific skill breakdowns in D20s, or the skill system in FATE (*World does not really have a broad analogue, just certain non-random Moves). In D20, deviation from baseline expectations requires a mechanical intervention or at least GM approval. Even in the case of a non-random, "Take 10" there is an implicit flow from fiction to "GM eyeballs DC" to "compute Skill + 10" and then finally back to the fiction. I consider this a mechanical intervention, and one that involves thought on part of both the GM and the player. In FATE Core, even unopposed (and thus non-random) Skill uses are framed as things that must go through one of the four mechanical actions (overcome, create advantage, attack, defend) that feed into the fiction-focused-yet-mechanical aspect system. For instance, FATE's "Rapport" could be used to Overcome/Create-an-Advantage to gain NPC trust in a similar way to our "Trustworthy" Shift, however it still has the path of fiction->action->GM->fiction. The intention of Shifts is to be even more streamlined than this - i.e. fiction->fiction. The character walks into the room, sees that the NPCs are suspicious, and the player declares that the character earns their trust because it says so on the character sheet with no abstraction into mechanics or approval by the GM. Feats: Feats are per-scene actions that a character can take to add elements to the scene. They are an "active fiat" that give the character license to change the path of the story in their favor - but always through the addition of new fiction rather than subtraction or negation of existing fiction or direct mechanical effects. The intention is that the additions that a Feat adds will be helpful, perhaps creating fictional justification for advantage or other secondary mechanical effects, but the mechanics follow the fiction. Feats in Some Heartbreaker are most appropriately contrasted against D20 encounter powers, FATE Stunts, or *World Moves. The important distinctions versus all of these is that Some Heartbreaker's Feats allow the player to make non-random declarations, they hit the fiction first and they are always additive to the fiction. Unlike D20 powers, our feats give no direct mechanical bonuses nor do they involve introducing additional high-powered action types (our action optimization remains the simplistic game of creating fictional justifications rather than comparing and selecting powers). Unlike FATE stunts, our feats are simple per-scene and do not hit a fate-point/invocation economy - they are meant to be used in all appropriate situations (maximizing player world-building) and not economized into only "third act" situations. Unlike *World moves, our feats never involve random determination. Long story short: our Feats are the primary means of increasing shared narrative.
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Jul 29, 2013 17:19
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