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Just jotting down some Feat design ideas. I think we are going to end up having several broad categories of feats (in general, not just in "Basic Breaker") : World Building - feats that allow a player to add lasting features to the game world. The intention of these feats is not just to give players fiat to world-build. The idea is focused world-building, with feats designed to let players introduce people and places that they have a relationship to and help generate the next adventure (as opposed to a deus-ex-game-mechanic that obviates adventure). An example is "I Know Just The Person" above - it is a hook into a narrative social interaction to solve a specific problem. World-building feats would most likely be divvied up by Skill such that adding characters to the world is under Social and adding places and history is under Exploration. I'm not entirely sure how broad-strokes world-building would work for Movement, Combat, or Creative. Scene Building - feats that allow a player to add a feature to a dramatic scene that aids the party. These feats would be fiats to make in-the-moment additions to the fiction in dramatic scenes that help the party. Character Fiats - feats that give a character special exceptions to genre defaults. The intention of these feats is to grant a special power in the game world. These still interact directly with the fiction rather than provide mechanical effects. Examples above would be the "Animal Empathy" feats - the unwritten assumption being that no matter how high one's Social Skill goes, it does not include the ability to converse with animals by fiat. Another example I have in the works for the RC-style genre is "Move Silently" - the unwritten assumption being that no matter how high one's Movement Skill goes it does not include the ability to get from point A to point B in a stealthy manner by fiat. Mechanical Feats - these are probably the most traditional (and yet the least interesting) feats there will be. Such things interface with the mechanics - causing effects, shifting who has advantage, granting extra effect options, etc. These feats will be the crunchy/tactical/powers-y feats. An example is the "Turn Undead" feat that I am cooking up (summary: initiate a CHA Conflict with every nearby character with the Undead trait). I feel like the RC genre of "Basic Breaker" will be lighter on these, as such things are not a huge part of the feel of RC. Despite the Turn Undead example, I generally want to avoid modeling spell-like things as mechanical feats - for instance, I'd much rather have a single 'Pyromancy' feat and have all fire-based attacks resolved as Skill Conflicts.
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Jan 22, 2014 20:31
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Here is a link to my progress on the first genre kit: Basic Breaker. The intent here is to create a set of feats and powers that are inspired by Rules Compendium, roughly creating the mapping of: RC Fighter -> Combat RC Thief -> Movement / Exploration RC Magic-User -> Arcane Power RC Cleric -> Spirit Power Demi-Humans -> Hybrids with a Trait There is still much to do, I've got alot of player-declarative feats written down, but not as many player-additive/shared-narrative feats as I would like. I'll also need to flesh out the Power rules in my rules doc, as much of the casting feats will follow from those.
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Jan 31, 2014 00:22
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Fleshed out some Exploration Feats a bit more for Basic Breaker. I'm aiming to have at least the following set of Feats for all skills: - fiat to do something cool at-will - fiat to do something very cool at will (with prereqs) - per-narrative-scene action to world-build or add options to the adventure - flexible per-dramatic-scene action that creates a helpful character moment - specialist per-dramatic-scene action to do something awesome - per-dramatic-scene action that allows a specific cross-skill usage (maybe one for each other skill?) The trick here is that I don't want any feats/powers that deflate dramatic tension or trivialize obstacles and scenes. For instance, the Exploration Feat "Wayfinder" is about shared-narrative adding alternatives to overcome obstacles - which could easily obviate the challenge of the obstacle. However, the wording says that the new way that you introduce is somehow dangerous (TBD by GM). So this feat does not obviate an obstacle, it simply introduces another, dangerous alternative. So either path taken leads to adventure, its just that the part has more choice and a richer world after the feat is used.
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Feb 7, 2014 23:25
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I am opening up a PbP alpha test of Some Heartbreaker in the Game Room
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Feb 21, 2014 00:36
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In preparation for the playtest, I've added an outline of a "Common Actions" section to the accelerated doc to explain how common things like melee attacks work.
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Feb 21, 2014 17:35
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Rules clarification: From your previous posts it looks like you ended the end result of stats to be within the 15-20 range, and if I've read the rules corrrectly this means a player will be rolling against a 5 for a "two great outcomes" situation? Similarly, when in danger where you have to use your Con at 20, you simply don't need to roll to deal with the danger?
QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 5, 2014 |
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Mar 5, 2014 23:08
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Skill scores at high levels will likely be in the 15-20 range, but skill scores never directly interact with d20 rolls - they are only ever compared against eachother to determine an expected outcome. Only ability scores ever get added to a d20 roll, and those stay in the 0-4 range even at high levels, so even when you are at max level, if there is something you are making a risk roll for in your best stat (+4), a natural roll of 1-5 is still "worse than expected" and a natural roll of 6 is still "mixed results".
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Mar 6, 2014 00:59
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With the completion of our first Dramatic Scene in the playtest thread, I'd like to highlight a few issues that have come up so far. Most of these issues can be attributed to the unfinished state of the game and will naturally be cleared up as both the genre kit and the SRD are fleshed out. The first issue has to do with the nature of opposed Skill contests. It is especially evident in the case of a single-goal opposed contest -- a "big bad" scenario like the one we just faced and less of an issue elsewhere. Your stated aim with the "shifting spotlight" system is to allow players to specialize their characters toward one aspect that interests them and then allow them to dominate that particular arena in a way that other RPGs might call "imbalanced," letting the narrative focus swing between the 5 Skills and highlight the characters that focus on those Skills as they come up. The way the Skill system works at the moment though seems to lead to situations in which a character with a high rating in a particular Skill will have a high narrative impact but a low degree of player involvement when faced with a situation that allows them to make use of their best Skill. A character with a high score in any given Skill will be uniquely able to sit back and take default results in a scene that highlights that Skill. If the scene has a single focal point, such as a "big bad" type enemy, the specialist can score automatic successes without risk, allowing them to breeze through the encounter on autopilot, simply following the expected thing and likely getting results as good as any other player. No tactical decisions need be made and feats with a cooldown longer than once per Scene are unlikely to be used at all as long as their Skill guarantees them risk free progress. This situation becomes more pronounced if a character has a high rating in a Skill but a low rating in the related Ability Score -- the character is, in this case highly incentivised to just take the default outcome each round. Conversely, it is the other players, those who have lower Skill ratings in the appropriate Skill who are engaging most with the fiction, using Feats, creative description and TAR rolls to try and land effects despite their low Skill ratings. This seems bizarre as a character with a high combat rating is the one playing the old D&D 2E style game of stand toe-to-toe and see who's hit points run out first, while the non-combat characters are playing a game much more akin to FAE as they try and use the tools available to them to make a difference. True, players with high Skill rating could choose to TAR for more damage, but their seems little reason to do so as they are more or less invulnerable until they do, allowing them to simply whether the threat until it either threatens something else or their default damage per round solves the problem. D&D 4E solves this problem by letting successful characters pick something extra to do when their character plays to their specialty, something that non-specialized characters can not do such as a cleric doling out extra healing, a paladin buffing allies on each hit, etc. DW does similar, but only when a character is both specialized (has a relevant power) and makes a roll of 10+. Consider giving characters with a high rating in a Skill some benefit beyond improved damage when they TAR despite having a Skill advantage in order to incentivise specialization over generalization. Letting them choose which of these benefits to apply on their hit would allow them a measure of tactical decision making especially if the bonuses available to them had some sort of associated cost such as inflicting Stress on the user, using up a resource or requiring or lowering a TAR roll. The second issue I am bringing up has to do with feats. I am not sure if this is even an issue, as I noticed it when using a feat I created and you approved rather than one that was a default part of the genre kit, but it seems like it could become a problem with other feats as well. Let me quote what you had to say on Feats back on page 1. Paolomania posted: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. So Feats are supposed to be non-random, non-mechanical and meant to be used readily, as frequently as their cooldown and the fiction allows. Several Feats, however, allow a player to introduce or modify a fictional element in order to provide an advantage with no specification as to what mechanical effect the advantage will have. This creates a situation where Feats, even though they include no dice rolling have a more or less random effect from a player perspective - they might introduce a debility, grant a bonus to an ability, introduce a fictional hazard or something else depending on GM fiat, which is invisible to a player - when introducing a friendly NPC or finding an object or throwing an alchemical concoction, I do not know what the effects of my action will be, assuming it is successful. Because a player does not know something concrete like "using this power will give a -2 to that stat" they cannot make a tactical decision about what to use when. Instead their character sheet reads "if I do these things, something good will happen" meaning that every Dramatic Scene becomes a race to find fictional justification to check off every feat on your sheet in the hopes that one of them will help. You may argue that this is a "gamist" view of Feat construction and players should be more interested in creating compelling fiction than using their abilities to the utmost, but since Paolomania posted:Long story short: our Feats are the primary means of increasing shared narrative. A players ability to impact the fiction and make it compelling is somewhat dependent on their ability to check those boxes as early and often as possible. I would suggest that this could be amended by giving Feats an AW/DW style list of things they could do which could be broadly interpreted. This gives the player enough direction to know when a given Feat would be more or less useful, allowing them to make tactical decisions while still keeping Feats broad enough to be frequently used. --------------- That was a lot of words devoted to two very minor problems, both of which can likely be changed by rewording or minor tweaks to the function of Skills. Overall I think the playtest has been going well and is illustrating the impact and effect of overlapping action well, but I thought some feedback might be useful to get a player's perspective of the operation of the rules as your design continues.
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Mar 13, 2014 19:42
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Those are some great points and I hope to continue this discussion when I have more time to post. The notes about feat usage are especially topical since the development of Feats and the Genre Kits are things I handwaved about earlier and in need of the most development. For things that are not technically "core" they are certainly pivotal to the success of the game as a whole.
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Mar 13, 2014 19:55
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(multi part response)quote:A character with a high score in any given Skill will be uniquely able to sit back and take default results in a scene that highlights that Skill. If the scene has a single focal point, such as a "big bad" type enemy, the specialist can score automatic successes without risk, allowing them to breeze through the encounter on autopilot, simply following the expected thing and likely getting results as good as any other player. No tactical decisions need be made and feats with a cooldown longer than once per Scene are unlikely to be used at all as long as their Skill guarantees them risk free progress. This situation becomes more pronounced if a character has a high rating in a Skill but a low rating in the related Ability Score -- the character is, in this case highly incentivised to just take the default outcome each round. There is nothing to say that the specialist should top a BBEG in skill (or that BBEG is the only way to structure a combat scene). In the case of the playtest combat, Gerens, the combat specialist, was evenly matched in combat skill to the single enemy, so he got no default damage effects and had to "Take A Risk" on every turn in try for damage output. There could even be a BBEG with combat skill greater than the specialist, so even he is taking hit just for a shot at doing some damage. Of course this relative-skill needs to be balanced against how much Health an antagonist has and how long the combat should run, but the idea is that "combat specialist just sits back and does automatic damage" is not true - not even in the playtest encounter.
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Mar 14, 2014 18:54
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quote:Conversely, it is the other players, those who have lower Skill ratings in the appropriate Skill who are engaging most with the fiction, using Feats, creative description and TAR rolls to try and land effects despite their low Skill ratings. This seems bizarre as a character with a high combat rating is the one playing the old D&D 2E style game of stand toe-to-toe and see who's hit points run out first, while the non-combat characters are playing a game much more akin to FAE as they try and use the tools available to them to make a difference. True, players with high Skill rating could choose to TAR for more damage, but their seems little reason to do so as they are more or less invulnerable until they do, allowing them to simply whether the threat until it either threatens something else or their default damage per round solves the problem. I think what you are getting at is that part of having the spotlight is feeling like your choices have more weight, however in our playtest scene with a single enemy it did not seem like Gerens had many choices to make outside of describing attacks. This is totally valid. With respect to feat usage, the specialist is actually supposed to have more tools (and therefore choices) at their disposal. It points to our current lack of dramatic Combat Feats in the Basic Breaker genre kit. Without a "now I make this awesome declaration" and a "now I make this awesome action", I think the specialist is missing something. Final note: if the problem is that non-specialists are feeling more engaged, then that is a good problem to have as it means we are definitely hitting our design goal of "everyone is engaged" and we are nowhere near "defer to the expert" territory.
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Mar 14, 2014 18:55
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quote:D&D 4E solves this problem by letting successful characters pick something extra to do when their character plays to their specialty, something that non-specialized characters can not do such as a cleric doling out extra healing, a paladin buffing allies on each hit, etc. DW does similar, but only when a character is both specialized (has a relevant power) and makes a roll of 10+. Consider giving characters with a high rating in a Skill some benefit beyond improved damage when they TAR despite having a Skill advantage in order to incentivise specialization over generalization. Letting them choose which of these benefits to apply on their hit would allow them a measure of tactical decision making especially if the bonuses available to them had some sort of associated cost such as inflicting Stress on the user, using up a resource or requiring or lowering a TAR roll. I do like the idea of feats that let a character use special effects, however the trick is to not implicitly proscribe other characters from doing the same thing by putting it behind a feat - i.e. we want anyone to be able to go for a trip just by engaging in a Combat Conflict and to make a feat that lets you trip for a combat effect implicitly says "without this feat you cannot do this". We would need to be careful to ensure that such special effects are really out-of-the-ordinary things that only the specialist could do. I think one thing that might be done is to make certain more powerful things (such as a trip or disarm which might establish a long-lasting advantage) cost multiple effects. Thus such things are not proscribed from use by other characters, but the specialist who has some default effects to spare would be closer to achieving it more often.
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Mar 14, 2014 19:08
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Paolomania posted:This is a good point and one of the intentions of the system is that "effects" can buy more than just damage dice - i.e. you can use an effect to trip or use an effect to disarm, etc. I don't the that the current writeup makes this clear enough. However, I want to avoid enumerating everything as an mechanical effect ala 4E - we want players to feel free to come up with creative actions without feeling like that have to choose from a list. We also want to keep things fiction-focused - i.e. we don't want to have a big list of mechanical conditions like "prone", and we just what exactly "prone" means to fiction and GM fiat.
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Mar 14, 2014 19:35
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quote:The second issue I am bringing up has to do with feats. I am not sure if this is even an issue, as I noticed it when using a feat I created and you approved rather than one that was a default part of the genre kit, but it seems like it could become a problem with other feats as well. Let me quote what you had to say on Feats back on page 1. quote:Several Feats, however, allow a player to introduce or modify a fictional element in order to provide an advantage with no specification as to what mechanical effect the advantage will have. (In retrospect, and because of the action economy of SH, I think the duration of the glue should have been measured more in turns rather than rounds as it really tanked the difficulty of the encounter.) quote:This creates a situation where Feats, even though they include no dice rolling have a more or less random effect from a player perspective - they might introduce a debility, grant a bonus to an ability, introduce a fictional hazard or something else depending on GM fiat, which is invisible to a player - when introducing a friendly NPC or finding an object or throwing an alchemical concoction, I do not know what the effects of my action will be, assuming it is successful. (I think part of it is that the Mad Alchemist feat is very open ended, almost being a one-feat replacement for an entire Power.) That said, one of my basic tenets is that uncertainty is not a problem - it is a design goal. Yes, not knowing exactly what effect an action will have might unsettle some players - but we don't want chess where players can predictably look ahead and plan things out several moves in advance - we want dramatic moments and an uncertain outcome creates a little momentary tension. quote:Because a player does not know something concrete like "using this power will give a -2 to that stat" they cannot make a tactical decision about what to use when. Instead their character sheet reads "if I do these things, something good will happen" meaning that every Dramatic Scene becomes a race to find fictional justification to check off every feat on your sheet in the hopes that one of them will help. You may argue that this is a "gamist" view of Feat construction and players should be more interested in creating compelling fiction than using their abilities to the utmost, but since quote:A players ability to impact the fiction and make it compelling is somewhat dependent on their ability to check those boxes as early and often as possible. I would suggest that this could be amended by giving Feats an AW/DW style list of things they could do which could be broadly interpreted. This gives the player enough direction to know when a given Feat would be more or less useful, allowing them to make tactical decisions while still keeping Feats broad enough to be frequently used.
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Mar 14, 2014 19:48
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Paolomania posted:Final note: if the problem is that non-specialists are feeling more engaged, then that is a good problem to have as it means we are definitely hitting our design goal of "everyone is engaged" and we are nowhere near "defer to the expert" territory. Indeed this is a good problem to have. The problem is not that non-specialist are engaged its that specialists need more compelling options/Feats, as you said Paolomania posted:I do like the idea of feats that let a character use special effects, however the trick is to not implicitly proscribe other characters from doing the same thing by putting it behind a feat - i.e. we want anyone to be able to go for a trip just by engaging in a Combat Conflict and to make a feat that lets you trip for a combat effect implicitly says "without this feat you cannot do this". We would need to be careful to ensure that such special effects are really out-of-the-ordinary things that only the specialist could do. You could avoid long lists of fiddly conditions by going the FATE route of just allowing PCs to add an Aspect to a target that imparts a -2 (or some other penalty) whenever that Aspect would be fictionally relevant. As for gating abilities such as trips and the like behind Feats I agree that's not ideal. Requiring the expenditure of multiple effects would work and would open up interesting teamwork possibilities i.e. if character A scores an Exploration effect by using a feat that allows them to analyze and pinpoint an enemy's weakness, they could donate that effect to character B, who could cash it in at some point along with a standard attack effect to deal a precision strike to that spot. In effect, you can make "effects" a meta-currency that comes in five flavors and could be passed among the party to achieve effects. To borrow terminology from Magic: The Gathering, player actions under such a system generate mana, with good fictional justification allowing players to generate mana of a any given color through Skill Substitution. Feats then, would serve one of two functions: they would either a) exist to aid in the production of mana by allowing fiat declarations that make fictional justification easier or allowing players do use fictional abilities they would not otherwise have to generate mana. or b) act as spells, allowing players to spend specific "colors" of mana, to achieve actions or declare fiats that might otherwise be too powerful for a general use feat. Adding in power sources such as magic and spirituality would provide additional colors of mana that could either be used as wildcards or to fuel magic/spirituality only Feats, as long as the fictional magic effects fit within the confines of the caster's magic/spirit Feats. This might also help specialists out by giving them something to do with additional effects gained from TAR rolls -- they could dole them out to the rest of the party or spend them on specialist abilities. If you wanted to play up the idea of the player party as a tightly woven band of experts in different fields, you could even make all earned effects flow into a party pool by default, though this would strain credibility when the party is split into different locations. Balancing such a system might be difficult though. Null Profusion fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Mar 14, 2014 |
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Mar 14, 2014 19:50
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Null Profusion posted:Indeed this is a good problem to have. The problem is not that non-specialist are engaged its that specialists need more compelling options/Feats, as you said - Specialists need more dramatic choice beyond establishing fiction for advantage (probably in the form of more Dramatic Feats) - Flesh out more effects for players to choose from (as choosing effects introduces more choice) quote:You could avoid long lists of fiddly conditions by going the FATE route of just allowing PCs to add an Aspect to a target that imparts a -2 (or some other penalty) whenever that Aspect would be fictionally relevant. quote:As for gating abilities such as trips and the like behind Feats I agree that's not ideal. Requiring the expenditure of multiple effects would work and would open up interesting teamwork possibilities i.e. if character A scores an Exploration effect by using a feat that allows them to analyze and pinpoint an enemy's weakness, they could donate that effect to character B, who could cash it in at some point along with a standard attack effect to deal a precision strike to that spot. In effect, you can make "effects" a meta-currency that comes in five flavors and could be passed among the party to achieve effects. Balancing such a system might be difficult though.
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Mar 14, 2014 20:20
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Paolomania posted:This is intentional as I want player to feel free to be creative in making their fictional declarations. For instance, "Just the right thing" could produce very different objects in very different circumstances and I don't want to over-define feats to the point where they always have a precise mechanical effect. I think I need to lay down more guidelines for how effects can be used to apply Debilities and such. The herbalist's combat-glue was a cool idea and a cool moment, but debilities (the system's only conditions, really) are powerful things mechanically, so I think the expected strength of such effects need to be clear to the players. Paolomania posted:That said, one of my basic tenets is that uncertainty is not a problem - it is a design goal. Yes, not knowing exactly what effect an action will have might unsettle some players - but we don't want chess where players can predictably look ahead and plan things out several moves in advance - we want dramatic moments and an uncertain outcome creates a little momentary tension. If you are OK with the randomness of the feats as is, then they are doing their job. They certainly allow the players agency and prompt for creative actions, but I worry that the lack of definition might make players feel over time that they have little narrative agency as they can choose to do a thing, but cannot predict whether it will be successful OR what the effect of a success will be. This does make it easier to take action, but limits a players sense of control over their characters destiny. This is not necessarily a problem, depending on just how frantic and out of control you want adventures in SH to feel, but should be a conscious decision. Forgive me if I am misunderstanding your design aims, as I am used to most games being built around the idea of nailing down as much of the world and mechanics as possible rather than intentionally trying to leave as many things open to GM interpretation as they can. D&D is notorious for assuming that players and GMs are working against each other, but even AW limits what sort of fiction the MC can introduce at a given moment. Paolomania posted:The range of mechanical effects is really very limited, either to advantage, damage, stress or a debility. The rest is handled by fictional expectations and GM fiat. OK having this spelled out is helpful. Not having a full list of Feats in the Genre Kit makes it difficult to know what the ranges and limitations on GM fiat are. Paolomania posted:I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here by "check those boxes". If you mean "apply your opening buffs and debuffs" then such standardized openings to combat are exactly what I want to avoid. Otherwise, and remembering that effects aren't just limited to damage dice but can also be generic "shifts for the better", "use a generic skill and roll TAR" flexibly covers any AE-Move-like effect that a player might want to try for, without the need for a custom move written up. This is exactly what I was referring to. Having this spelled out for Feats answers the concerns I had.
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Mar 15, 2014 01:26
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Null Profusion posted:If you are OK with the randomness of the feats as is, then they are doing their job. They certainly allow the players agency and prompt for creative actions, but I worry that the lack of definition might make players feel over time that they have little narrative agency as they can choose to do a thing, but cannot predict whether it will be successful OR what the effect of a success will be. This does make it easier to take action, but limits a players sense of control over their characters destiny.
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Mar 15, 2014 02:32
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Paolomania posted:The whole point of all these rules is that randomness is a choice and, outside of unknowns, in most cases the player can expect the expected. If this is the aim, might I suggest restructuring Feats to represent this. Examples: Elven Grace (Heritage, Fiat) You have a gift for hunting in the forest. It is Expected that you can move silently in any forested environment. You can TAR to move silently in any environment. Hide in Plain View (Movement, Fiat) You are adept at hiding. It is Expected that when characters are not aware of your presence will remain unaware of your presence so long as you remain silent and they do not closely inspect your hiding place. While hiding you can TAR to move to another hiding place without being noticed. Hear Noise (Exploration, Fiat) You have skill at understanding faint noises, even when muffled. When you have a quiet moment to listen, even through a door or thin wall, it is Expected that you hear any faint noises on the other side. The GM must give you a description of what any noise is from. Depending on the circumstances, this description may be clear or rough, but it must always be accurate. Alternatively, you can TAR and the GM will tell you what you THINK you hear. Your impression will be clear, but may not be accurate. Iron Fists (Combat, Fiat) Prerequisites: Improvised Weapons You are adept at using your body as a weapon. It is Expected that you are just as deadly empty-handed as if you were armed and that being unarmed never puts you at a disadvantage. You may choose to TAR to use your hands or feet in place of a sword or shield to parry or block arrows or melee attacks and use Feats that would normally require you to be armed. Locksmith, Journeyman (Creative, Narrative) You are skilled at picking locks. It is Expected that you can quickly and soundlessly pick any lock at or under your Creative Skill as a Narrative Action so long if you have a proper lock pick. You may choose to TAR to attempt to pick a lock with a rating greater than your Creative Skill. My Reputation Precedes Me (Social, Dramatic) It is Expected that someone in the room always seems to have heard of you. Once per Social Scene, indicate a character that you have just met or introduce a new character. This character has heard of your deeds and has your respect. You may choose to TAR to indicate exactly what this character has heard about you, regardless of whether it is true or not. The results of your TAR roll will determine their impression of you. Structuring the Feats in this way and spelling out the effect on the Expected Thing would give players something concrete to expect and be able to work into the fiction while allowing them to TAR for greater risk/reward. Null Profusion fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 04:05
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My first draft of the feats actually looked something like that, however I went back and edited them down. I have some specific reasons that I did that, but let me begin by quoting from discussion section 6 (some terminology and design has changed so bear with):page 22 posted: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. page 28 posted:Yes, the intent is that "Shifts" do not work directly on the mechanics - by that I mean they do not add numerical bonuses to Abilities or Skills or work upon the dice rolling or any game elements that are "out of the fiction". The intent is that "Shifts" work directly on the fictional expectations of what a character can do (since the game is meant to largely run on default outcomes, allowing the players to focus on relationship and identity choices rather than mathematical optimization choices), and mechanical intervention follows after these fictional expectations are set. There is some element of "quantizing" the fiction that is necessary in order to apply a shift. This is where GM judgement comes in... I made the specific design choice that SH is "fiction first" - i.e. that the mechanics derive from the fiction and not the other way around. It is something of a philosophical distinction, but we can see the way that sticking to this design decision plays out in the formulation of Feats. Considering "Elven Grace", by saying "you may move silently in the forest" you are establishing clear fiction from which the Expected Thing mechanic derives (and TES is worded such that it derives from fiction). By saying "The Expected Thing is that you may move silently in the forest" you are putting the mechanic first and saying that the feat has a mechanical effect that then dictates the fiction. I think the former is simpler, more flexible, and more plainly expressed. Considering adding Take A Risk clauses to Feats, I also disagree. For instance "You may TAR to move silently in any environment" is redundant. Any character can make a go at moving silently in any environment already, and that may or may not involve TAR depending on who might be around to observe. The same with the other feats. Players can already opt to TAR on top of outcomes. Feats are meant to be far more flexible than Apocalypse Engine moves that enumerate a list of success options because this style of design leads to what I consider an unnecessary abundance of custom classes with custom moves for every thematic variation of "character who is good at combat/magic/etc". Anything that would be a move in Apocalypse Engine is instead represented in Some Heartbreaker as "Use one of the big Skills and lay down some cool fiction. Maybe Take A Risk if it something dramatic."
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Mar 16, 2014 00:24
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Based on alpha-test feedback, the early section on shared narrative has been expanded to make the baseline shared narrative more clear. (everything subject to GM approval, GM should approve all fluff). Here is the new section:quote:Creating Fiction
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Mar 27, 2014 18:01
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I made a few edits to the Accelerated Rules doc. At-Risk was renamed to Risky. The starting allotment of Ability Points has been increased to 11 (or 10+Level). (In the process of distilling Some Heartbreaker down to Some One-Page Heartbreaker for the April design challenge, I realized that the advancement scheme I had gone with was creating Ability Scores that were lower than intended). We now have starting (11 point) Ability distributions such as: specialist: 4,1,0,0,0,0 generalist: 2,2,1,1,1,1 pyramid: 3,2,1,1,0,0 And end-game (20 point) distributions such as: dual-spec: 4,4,0,0,0,0 generalist: 3,3,2,2,1,1 pyramid: 4,3,2,1,0,0 Paolomania fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 16:44
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We just got through our first non-combat Dramatic Scene over in the play-test. Some things went well and some problems came to light. On the good side, the scene was engaging enough, had interesting dynamics between goals and characters, and created fiction and beats that will propel the game forward past the next scene. On the bad side, the biggest issue was that the scene ended up making frequent use of the TAR mechanic - essentially on every player action. Player feedback indicated that this created a level of perceived risk and swinginess that was very high. Certainly we don't want our mechanics to be random to the point where players do not feel that they have agency, or that their decisions and descriptions don't matter as much as the dice. Let's revisit some of our design and consider how the scene created this player perception. Revisiting Mechanics Revisiting the TAR mechanic, its usage is intended to address problems with both binary resolution as well as normally distributed resolution. The "something or nothing" problem of success-oriented binary resolution is mitigated by adding failure consequence, and the wide swing is mitigated by adding degrees and mixed results. Proponents of normally distributed resolution neglect to account for intended usage - such mechanics create lots of "middling" results and the usage of TAR is meant for dramatic punctuation where expecting middling results deflates tension. I feel that fundamentally the mechanic is sound and it served its purpose well in the play-test scene, adding tension and creating dramatic moments. However, I believe that the mechanic was overused: a mechanic that is used on absolutely every action ceases to be a punctuation and is just a norm (more on this in a bit). Revisiting the mechanics of Skill Conflicts/Challenges, Default+Risk is meant to be an answer to scaling problems that can occur with any resolution mechanic. Once skills and targets get too far apart there is often no point in rolling as success is either guaranteed or excluded. Default+Risk sets up a situation where even someone at an extreme disadvantage can have a good chance of positive contribution if they are willing to pay the price, and even someone with an extreme advantage can take consequences if they are put at risk. For Combat, this provides a natural way for the little guy to gang up on the big guy - a dynamic that we will eventually see in Mook-vs-PC and PC-vs-Big-Bad scenarios. It also sets up skill scenarios where a character is allowed to make forward progress on a larger goal so that the story doesn't block while taking side consequences - for instance a character might easily climb a rope by default, but a risky situation might cause them to drop an item. In the play-test scene, this mechanic worked to keep the scene moving forward as players and goals were taking default stress as well as risk stress which continuously pushed the scene towards resolution. One possible change to Skill Conflicts/Challenges would be to expand the "stalemate zone" so that small differentials of one or two points would not result in default stress - however this would need some careful consideration. Revisiting the Advantage mechanic, Advantage is meant to be an incentive for establishing good fiction or rationale for an action. Although it is meant to be GM-determined, the PbP nature of the play-test made the protocol of Advantage granting unwieldily, so we just had players add it in fairly automatically. As with TAR, this made Advantage into an automatic and assumed mechanic rather than a punctuation. Also, even with Advantage added in, players perceived the risk of TAR to be very high despite EVs greatly in their favor. Finally, because Advantage was tied to Ability Scores, characters with low scores in all relevant abilities did not have a big incentive to push for gaining Advantage. Of all the mechanics, I think Advantage needs the most consideration for a change. Scene Design The Dramatic Scene in question was a Social Scene and thus involved social interaction as the primary mode of action and goals that involved reputation and relationships. The primary goal of the scene was given a relatively high Skill Target. This high target made most characters take default stress on actions towards the primary goal, and forced all characters to use TAR to have any chance of progress on the main goal. This positioning of the difficulty set up the scene as a very high-risk and high-stress scene. I do not necessarily think that creating such an option for scene design is bad - however I think that a setup where characters needed to TAR on every action and players perceived a high level of risk should have been reserved for a much more climactic scene such as a boss-fight or arc-ending scene. Thankfully this dynamic could be changed simply by adjusting the Skill Target down to a point where characters can make default progress and only feel compelled to TAR if their progress is falling behind a scene timer or a competing goal. Aside from adjusting targets down, the proposed expansion of the "stalemate zone" in Skill Conflicts would also serve to ease up on the difficulty by reducing default stress.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:52
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Crossposting and quoting you from the Alphatest OOC thread:Paolomania posted:I want a system that, rather than rewarding players for rationally avoiding the fire, encourages players to run into the fire because even if they lose it means that something interesting will happen and the game will be richer for it. I think this requires much more work on hammering out the costs and consequences that are possible. This will be a hard sell to most RPG players. I can think of a handful of indie games that have tried it before, with mixed results. A few are mentioned in the F&F thread, but the only one I am familiar with is Motobushido. A big part of Motobushido that is explicitly called out (frequently) in the rules is that your character will, inevitably, die or otherwise face permanent narrative elimination at some point. The rules are set up to cause this, and characters are built around this idea, having as some of their attributes predictions (that can be invoked for bennies) about how their journey will end and various personal failings that have mechanical kick to push their character toward certain types of elimination. One technique Motobushido uses to encourage players to throw their characters headlong into danger is that character advancement, XP and certain other advantages stick to the player, not the character, so losing a character that has accumulated a lot of badness over the course of a game can actually be mechanically beneficial, if fictively punitive. Another option I've seen in some RPG systems (though I can't remember which ones now) is the concept of Scars. Scars are accumulated when your character is forcibly removed from the narrative in some way (they needn't be literal scars) and represent some minor permanent mechanical gain from getting Scars and surviving. While a permanent bonus might be a bit too major an effect for a game that encourages repeated elimination of most of the party, the idea of tying some sort of a mechanical benefit or metacurrency to getting eliminated is one that might help to reward the sort of play you are looking for.
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Apr 25, 2014 21:15
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That is a good point, and I think we can come at it from both directions. On one hand, players need to realize that getting KOed from a scene doesn't necessarily mean death and disaster, and more often just means complication and inconvenience. On the other hand, I like your metacurrency idea and Fate Points being the natural fit. This echoes awarding XP for a failed TAR - i.e. when the player gets stung they always get a special consolation prize that provides some form of karmic balance.
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Apr 25, 2014 21:49
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Paolomania posted:That is a good point, and I think we can come at it from both directions. On one hand, players need to realize that getting KOed from a scene doesn't necessarily mean death and disaster, and more often just means complication and inconvenience. On the other hand, I like your metacurrency idea and Fate Points being the natural fit. This echoes awarding XP for a failed TAR - i.e. when the player gets stung they always get a special consolation prize that provides some form of karmic balance. I'm trying really hard to parse all of this. If you get KO'd from a scene, you lose narrative agency in that scene AND get a complication or inconvenience. Have I got that correct? If so, it's a lose/lose and therefore no wonder that players are trying to avoid it (even if it's not death, per se) If you take a risk and succeed, usually this results in avoiding both bad things; if you fail, probably one/both Bad things will happen, but you get XP. 1) does XP do anything cool, or just make numbers go up? 2) it seems like you want the players to fail (or at least risk failing) because "more interesting" things happen that way. This seems counterintuitive. Like, if "success" means the players advance the linear plot and don't get inconvenienced along the way, while "failure" means the DM throwing up roadblocks to divert the players from their goals, it comes off as almost adversarial, with incentivizing failure being railroady. I dunno. Is this how it feels to the playtesters, or am I theorycrafting out of left field?
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Apr 26, 2014 01:05
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P.d0t posted:I'm trying really hard to parse all of this. quote:If you take a risk and succeed, usually this results in avoiding both bad things; if you fail, probably one/both Bad things will happen, but you get XP. quote:2) it seems like you want the players to fail (or at least risk failing) because "more interesting" things happen that way. This seems counterintuitive. quote:Like, if "success" means the players advance the linear plot and don't get inconvenienced along the way, while "failure" means the DM throwing up roadblocks to divert the players from their goals, it comes off as almost adversarial, with incentivizing failure being railroady.
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Apr 26, 2014 14:10
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A brief change of pace to rejuvenate the writing ... Genre and Relationships One of the underlying philosophies of Some Heartbreaker is that genre is not what makes a party-based RPG compelling. Taking inspiration from improv and theater, Some Heartbreaker comes at the RPG with the perspective that relationships are what makes a narrative game compelling. Moreover, it takes the view that there is universality to the dynamics of party-based relationships and thus any genre emulation can use the same mechanics to achieve a compelling shared narrative. At the heart of all role-playing games is the element of self-expression and identity play, however this does not tell the whole story of party-based RPGs in particular. At the heart of many RPGs is a relation between peers. Broadly speaking, this is not the only possibility - games such as Apocalypse World or Fiasco can have players acting independently or adversarially. However, a large number of games have a pretense that the players will form a group (the party) that works toward some common goal. Such party-based RPGs provide the opportunity for the player to express a character that creates unique value for the group. The party-based design thus makes the game a context where, despite their real-world abilities or station, a group of players can build a narrative of mutual reliance and mutual esteem that expresses a peer relationship that might not be as easily expressed in school, work or home life. Even if a game admits to the party pretense, there are many ways to execute it. Design considerations often consider whether each player can contribute (at all), the balance of contribution, and perhaps the uniqueness or necessity of contribution. In a traditional combat-focused game, these are all considered in the context of a combat task, and over the years combat designs have included, whether implicit or explicit, subdivision of combat into specialized roles (tank, damage, crowd control, healer, ranged damage, battlefield control, etc. etc.) and better game designs having a balance of tasks for these roles. The best combat-focused designs indeed achieve the goals of establishing the peer value relation, however the combat-focused game necessarily focuses self-expression on the tactical combat role. This focus is insufficient for players who wish to provide equitable value to the group outside of the combat context, let alone players whose expressed character is not particularly combat focused. From that perspective, even the best balanced combat RPG does not offer players unique expression, there are rather many ways to express the same thing (combat specialty). Games with less focus on combat are better situated to offer players a wide range of self-expression. One approach is to leave things wide open, as with games like FATE. However, such games are many times not designed with an eye on explicit balance of group contribution. FATE in particular is hard to criticize as it achieves narrative balance through its point economy, and this economy can be used to access character relations as well. Yet, the Fate Point economy is quite open ended and does not provide explicit scaffolding of group value in the same way that a tightly designed tactical combat RPG does. This is the motivation of the Some Heartbreaker specialization into common modes of interaction. In Some Heartbreaker, each player can provide unique value to the group by specializing in a niche that covers large swaths of interaction with the game world. With the SH "Movement, Exploration, Combat, Creative, Social" breakdown, there are few enough skills that a small party can have complete coverage of interactions, and each specialization can have tremendous impact on the way the party relates to the world. The Movement specialist provides the value of getting the party where they need to be in the environment. The Exploration specialist provides the value of exposition and world building. The Combat specialist provides the value of overcoming antagonists. The Creative specialist provides the value of making solutions to the party's problems. The Social specialist provides the value of navigating the party's political and social relations. To break interaction down in this way both provides players with a broad range of expression beyond combat and gives each player a niche for unique contribution. With a balanced mix of encounters based on each type of interaction (in effect, establishing our "shifting spotlight" design), you have a party that relies on each member at some point (mutual reliance) and each character gets a chance to shine (mutual esteem) - or the compelling aspect of the party-based adventure RPG. This generic skill breakdown is also abstract enough that it may be applied to any genre.
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May 5, 2014 23:46
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Do you usually play RPGs with the same group/always with close friends? It just sounds that way, from what you posted.
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May 6, 2014 06:25
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Not really. Most of my current RL group is happy to murder-hobo their way through combat all night. But over the years I've seen plenty of players that were engaged by other types of encounters - be they puzzles or social interactions - lose interest when the night is spent grinding through combat crunch. Nowadays they just drop to their phones. I've also seen players lose interest because captain optimizer obviated their combat role - and yes there are meta-game solutions to this but wouldn't it be nice if the rules inherently supported party balance? (and what is the meta-game talk to captain optimizer if not an enforcement of a peer relationship within the party?)
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May 6, 2014 13:55
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Example Genre Construction As example of the applicability of SH to a broad range of genres, let's consider one a bit departed from intentionally generic one presented in our test Genre Kit, Basic Breaker. "Attack on Titan" is contemporary fiction that has a unique and imaginative world. It also happens to have an unofficial Apocalypse Engine game in "Titan World". Let's take a look at how Titan World handles "Attack on Titan" and then consider how Some Heartbreaker might handle the same genre. "Attack on Titan" presents a world where humanity has been attacked by a mysterious race of giant naked imbecile humanoids that like to eat people. The human race has holed itself up inside an area surrounded by several concentric colossal walls. The protagonists of the story are members of various military corps that zip around on gas-powered grappling lines (3D-maneuver gear) while attacking titans with blades and occasionally rifles and cannons. A look at Titan World The first observation to make about Titan World is that it is very combat-focused. Of the 8 Basic Moves, 3 are explicitly about fighting titans (Get Into Position, Strike to Kill, Escape Death), 2 are about fighting (Hand to Hand, Keep Your Cool), 2 are about generic physical danger (Avoid Harm, Desperate Rescue), and 1 is about awareness with 2/4 results dealing with immediate titan threats (Assess the Situation). Most of the additional moves from the playbooks are also directly about fighting or fighting titans (17/30): The Natural (4/6), The Warrior (4/6), The Tactician (2/6), The Leader (1/6), The Shifter (6/6). The mechanics play out largely around preparing for and executing combat against titans, with a push to gain advantages to set up a killing blow against a titan while avoiding disadvantages such as "low on blades" and "low on gas" and making dramatic (and sometimes self-sacrificial) moves to save friends and complete the mission. Titan World certainly gets the exciting, high-risk/high-mortality, for-the-greater-good feel of combat in the genre. As well, its playbooks set up the thematic archetypes presented in the story and how their personalities relate to the group and play out in battle. Titan World is an excellent fiction-based ruleset for a combat-heavy game in the world of "Attack on Titan" that encourages thematic play through its playbooks. Before we critique I must say that Titan World is pretty great and you should check it out if you are into the world of Attack on Titan. My nitpicks are fairly small and only apply for the sake of players who want the broadest range of play-style within the genre. I levee the same critiques against Titan World that I levee against Dungeon World: the mechanics are combat-focused and the fluff is baked-in. Although fights against titans are central to the fiction of AoT, the story spends a significant portion of time out-of-combat - focusing on the inner states of characters, their relationships to each other and the corps, political machinations within the corps and the city, exploration and exposition of the world and its backstory, and so on. For players who want a richer exploration of the AoT world, Titan world has little support for balancing narrative agency and encounter types. Thematic non-combat moves such as "Here's the Plan" and "We Stand As One" may give non-combat narrative agency, but their frequency-of-use is guaranteed to be much lower than that of combat moves. As well, with playbooks that present strong thematic choices, a player who wishes to take a different approach to the same ends, or attempt something that doesn't quite fit a trigger, or have different range of fictional effects has little recourse but to write another playbook that effectively does the same thing slightly differently (as we saw with the explosion of Dungeon World playbooks). Finally, I have to critique the inclusion of the shifter as a playbook. I argue that, although they exist within the AoT story, this privileged role makes a player singular figure that is a dramatic device with significantly greater impact on the narrative than other characters. If we admit the party pretense, it is clear that such a character is not appropriate for our game (or perhaps all characters should be shifters). Hypothetical: Titan Breaker How would Some Heartbreaker handle the world of Attack on Titan? Let's think about what kinds of additional situations we want to handle and think about what a hypothetical "Titan Breaker" kit would be like. First, we answer the question of what is a dramatic character? Our characters are all members of the military corps and trained to use 3D-maneuver gear while wielding two blades. What kinds of dramatic situations would these characters find themselves in? Of course there would combat against titans, but the AoT world includes alot more. The story often visits situations of great consequence that don't involve fighting - trials and military tribunals, altercations with religious sects, sorties to explore outlying territories, and so on. Some Heartbreaker takes the stance that to give such aspects of the world equal time and give players who wish to focus on these aspects fair treatment, they should be modeled as Dramatic Scenes with as much crunch as combat. Mechanically, the game would play out as has been outlined in our scene constructions, with stress accumulation leading towards a limit of consequence. As with Titan World, injury and resource exhaustion would be abstracted - in our case into Debilities and fictional consequence. In this light, hitting the stress limit during combat could be seen as the equivalent of Titan World's softer disadvantages such as "low on blades/gas", but for our purposes would also serve for things like "on the verge of being arrested" or "about to make a horrible discovery" depending on the scene. As a high-mortality genre, the genre kit would probably attach more severe consequences to combat, with more HP damage than stress during fights, death on damage=HP, and harsher consequences for a stress KO (perhaps a TAR against death or brief chance for others to save one from being eaten). Ability and Skill scores mechanically speaking would be the same (d4 to a d12 effect-size, 1 to 5 default effects over a baseline challenge), and fictionally range from the dramatic baseline of "entry level corps" to peak human performance - as always, the fluff of the how/why/quality of each stat being entirely up to the player. Comparing against the Titan World playbooks, most moves would be replaced by SH's The Expected Thing and Take A Risk, with default expectations being determined by our generic skills. In Titan World terms, our genericsroughly map per-playbook as Combat to the Warrior, Movement to the Natural, Exploration to the Tactician, Social to the Leader. Creative does not map. To put things in terms of the AoT archetypes, we have examples of each: Combat (Mikasa who pretty much destroys everything), Exploration (Armin who pretty much figures everything out), Social (Historia who persuades people at critical moments), Movement (Connie who is good at being fast), and Creative (Hange who develops awesome traps and tech). The thematic elements of each archetype would be moved to our 'feats' which, in addition to AE move-like powers, would include our fiat player-declared scene modification and world building, with the suite of Combat feats giving a player the ability to kick titan rear end and turn the tide of combat missions (perhaps including things Titan World puts outside the Warrior such as "Combat Medic"), Exploration feats for the player who wants to world-build and make declarations about the backstory of the titans and the walls, Social feats for the player who wants to impact how the party relates to the political apparatus and military chain of command, Movement feats for the player who wants to master the environment with a dose of positional combat utility, and Creative feats for the player who wants to declare material solutions to the party's problems.
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May 6, 2014 20:04
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Revisiting Mechanics (cont) Let's return to the topic of what we learned from the playtest scenes and how the mechanics might be changed to better achieve the design goals. The main issue revealed can be summarized as too much "Take A Risk". Our goals stated that TAR is meant for punctuating dramatic moments, however the mechanical design - specifically the Skill-Conflict rules - resulted in a TAR on almost every action. In order to move the scene forward, player actions were forced into being incredibly swingy (estimability was one of our goals) and the value of the TAR mechanic as a highlight of momentary tension was diluted. After much consideration, I believe the way forward is to return to the idea that a TAR should be a less frequent and more voluntary occurance. This means that regardless of opposing stats all players should be able to make forward progress in the scene without TAR. This requires a fundamental shift in focus on positive action that will require mathematical rebalancing of the system. By positive action, I mean that the default outcome of a player action - i.e. "The Expected Thing" should tend to move the game forward. So, rather than an assumption of a neutral or no-effect outcome as a base or starting point for determining results, we assume a positive effect and modify from there in our additive way. Making positive action the default establishes that all character actions are assumed to be somewhat effective - an assumption that is also consistent with our design goal of always moving scenes towards resolution. This assumption can also help us in handling scenes with a free-form structure rather than a stress-goal structure. To make things concrete, let's consider Combat as our root. The "positive action" assumption would mean that for a melee attack, the default outcome is that a character gets to roll their melee damage against their target regardless of relative Combat Skill (the current mechanics, in contrast, have "no effect" as the starting point). Additional effects based on relative Combat Skill are then added on top of that, and finally TAR is an option for the voluntary risk-takers. A large side-effect of this change will be that more effects will be occurring overall. In order to hit our targets for scene length and difficulty, we will need to rebalance character and goal stress limits so that all these extra effects can still be absorbed. We will also rebalance scene math which assumed frequent employment of TAR to assume infrequent TAR. The end result should mathematically be a wash (same number of character actions, similar number of effects, same scene length), but the math is not the important aspect of this change. What is important is the player perception of a more steady scene flow and a more controlled element of risk.
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Jun 12, 2014 17:36
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The New Assumption Going back and reviewing the design goals, I feel that everything still stands, we are just looking for an execution that arrives at the desired gameplay. To address the issues with the playtest while keeping with the general idea that we want mechanics that keep the story moving, I'm going to tweak the definition of The Expected Thing to include an "Assumption of Effect". This goes beyond the previous assumption that there is always an outcome or consequence. We shift the baseline assumption in the positive direction in order to make it clear that taking action moves the game forward. This adjustment to a basic assumption about action will have some far reaching implications for encounter balance and as a results we will have to redo math and analysis. Practical Implications The immediate practical implications of the "Assumption of Effect" is that players will know that their actions always have some effect. In terms of Combat, this equates to "attacks will always have an effect" - in other words if you make a melee attack the baseline is that you do one Stress Effect, rather than none. In terms of conflicts this will shift the outcome slightly towards the acting character. For a more abstract Combat example, let's say a character is attempting to seize an object from another character, we might interpret our new assumption as meaning that they are at least successful in grabbing the object and creating a struggle. For a Social situation, the new assumption means that regardless of relative skill a character's words are never totally ignored. For a Movement situation it might mean something like leaping a dangerous gap always gets you across (although you might end up hanging on for dear life on the other side). And so on for other skills. Comparison to Inspiration Systems The "Assumption of Effect" definitely puts us in different territory than our inspiration systems. Not only is this assumption not pass/fail, but it is also not good/bad - it is "always some good and maybe some more good or bad on top". The closest thing is a system with "effect on miss" rules - but even in systems that have such powers, the rules tend to be specific to individual powers rather than system-wide. We are going system-wide with this. Balance Implications The "Assumption of Effect" essentially adds one expected effect to every character action. This will have a significant impact on our math and will mean that all-around stress and damage accumulation is going up, which in turn means that we need to recalculate things like Health and Stress limits for characters and goals alike.
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Jul 15, 2014 22:13
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Paolomania posted:Comparison to Inspiration Systems Again, I recommend you check out Motobushido. Characters in that game are assumed to never fail completely unless it is time for them to die / be eliminated in a dramatic fashion. Characters are assumed to succeed at whatever they try and do, (as long as they are attempting to do something reasonable) but their success may well carry a cost they may be unwilling to bear - depending on check results it may take too many resources, incur complications or even succeed by so great a margin as to create dishonor by not giving an opponent a sporting chance. DW uses a similar tactic for the Moves of some of its spellcasting classes. Casting a spell is assumed to succeed, but may affect more or less than you wanted, draw unwanted attention, cost resources or even explicitly act in such a way as to make you wish you had never cast it. Better successes allow you to eliminate or mitigate these constraints. Both Motobushido and DW are games in which the rules are very tightly woven with the setting, so creating an abstract version for a universal system like SH is trying to be may be difficult, but I think changing the Expected Thing from "nothing happens" to "you succeed - at a (known) cost" might give players more inclination to TAR while still giving them a reasonably safe option if they feel that the TAR is too risky or unpredictable. Ideally the costs incurred for doing the Expected Thing would deplete a different resource pool than TAR - if the Expected result is Stress, then TAR risks losing an item, or losing accumulated points toward the scene goal, or bringing in a new complication or so on. In short, I am suggesting that the Expected thing should be a known tradeoff while TAR is an unknown - both options involve risking something, but with TAR you wager an unknown negative effect against a greater potential positive effect, meaning that players will TAR not only when they need a bigger hit, but also when they can't afford to risk any further loss of a given resource.
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Jul 16, 2014 18:31
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Thanks, I'll check Motobushido out on DriveThru (oh hey its on sale!)quote:In short, I am suggesting that the Expected thing should be a known tradeoff while TAR is an unknown
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Jul 16, 2014 19:47
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The other change that I would like to make is to work on the incentives for risk-taking. Independent of the motivational factors that drive our scenes (i.e. the character-driven contention between scene goals), I really want that temptation to take risks to be very strong. I'm thinking that a scene should play out as a game of group push-your-luck. I'm not entirely sure yet how to mechanically support this.
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Jul 17, 2014 23:30
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Paolomania posted:I really want that temptation to take risks to be very strong. I'm thinking that a scene should play out as a game of group push-your-luck. I'm not entirely sure yet how to mechanically support this. You seem to be of two minds about the structure of your game. The entire concept of the Expected Thing exists to streamline play and eliminate rolling in unexciting situations, but you seem to more or less never want players to use it. Why not just eliminate it altogether and replace it with player fiats (give players more declarative ability to simply narrate that they have done the sort of actions that would make for boring rolls in D&D 3.5, or achieved the sort of effects that might qualify as expected things.) You could even attach this to some sort of metagame economy if you wanted to increase tension further: players can use a declarative fiat any number of times and do not need to spend anything to do so, but when they do, they generate one Doom Point or somesuch for the GM, who can use it to advance a threat clock or introduce a new threat in the scene or a new agent for one of the campaign goals.
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Jul 18, 2014 16:22
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Null Profusion posted:You seem to be of two minds about the structure of your game. The entire concept of the Expected Thing exists to streamline play and eliminate rolling in unexciting situations, but you seem to more or less never want players to use it. quote:You could even attach this to some sort of metagame economy if you wanted to increase tension further: players can use a declarative fiat any number of times and do not need to spend anything to do so, but when they do, they generate one Doom Point or somesuch for the GM, who can use it to advance a threat clock or introduce a new threat in the scene or a new agent for one of the campaign goals. On the other hand, if there is an element of nonlinearity - i.e. if rapid buildup of GM points/holds is more dangerous than slow buildup - then such a mechanic could be used to control pacing. Come to think of it, this would be a good place to also implement a push-your-luck or escalation mechanic. If this was something like points/holds which can be later cashed-in for effect, and the effects get larger the more there are, but maybe they are cleared at certain intervals, then the players are incentivised to both spread out their targets and rate of buildup. I'll definitely do more thinking about this.
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Jul 18, 2014 19:16
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My thoughts on this have been pretty disorganized over the past week, so I'm just going to throw out some notes to keep the idea crank turning.
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Jul 24, 2014 20:37
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 07:43 |
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I will be between jobs for the next month, and so will have a rare amount of time on my hands to work on Some Heartbreaker. In the interest of motivating production, I am setting the goal of having a completed 1st edition of the Core rules and one Genre Kit by September 7th. In addition, I will be toxxing myself on this.
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Aug 1, 2014 16:21
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