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Hi, new here; well, okay, I registered around a year ago and been lurking on and off, but this is my first post. Anyway, let's cut to the chase, ya?

I hate the crap out of pawn stance. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate the idea of a player using the character as nothing more than an avatar. It's so very MMO-like, and really, in my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of how things need to be done in an RPG.

I'm not a fan of author stance in general, though, either.

At the same time, though, completely dividing the player from the character can create too much of a disconnect. If the determinants of a character's actions are purely mechanical, then the player can - theoretically - simply make a bunch of rolls in said system and send it to the GM, and never even sit at the table. The character's actions play out regardless of the player's wishes, and so it becomes a lot less like an RPG and more like a movie.

The ideal, I think, would be a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever.

I've had this discussion with some of my co-developers (yes, there is a system being built behind this question, so it's not just a pointless inquiry), and the consensus has been largely against any kind of rules support for a character's beliefs, for whatever reasons... I don't recall them, perfectly. Anyway, the system we concluded our discussion with looks like this...

Basic Idea
A character's beliefs are defined in pairs of opposing ideas. Think Pendragon, sort of, though I'll admit I had some issues wrapping my head around that system. So, for instance, responsibility and freedom are opposed "virtues." If that opposed pair doesn't quite make sense to you, don't worry, there are plenty of concerns of that nature to go around; right now we're working with a rather ill-defined virtue set, some of which don't make much sense.

If you've ever played the Magic CCG, this next part will sound familiar: virtues are divided into five groups, which - for right now - are based on colors. There are eight virtues in each color, four of which oppose a different color (so white, for example, has four virtues that oppose red, and four that oppose black). This is important because a character's beliefs are measured in two ways - once for a general feeling regarding an "ethos," which is the color as a whole, and again for each specific virtue. The sum of a character's strength of belief in a virtue is the ethos value + virtue value. It's possible for this result to be 0 (which is where the scale bottoms out), though I'm not yet sure what that means.

There are then three ways to determine how a character acts, when a virtue set comes into play (exactly what constitutes requiring determining what the character does is another area of contention - any advice there would be rather awesome). As it stands, all three of these methods are valid ways of doing things, and - for the moment - it is presumed that all three co-exist in the system.

(1) Each virtue has a static value assigned to it. Act according to the one that has a higher value.

(2) Each virtue also has some random number generators assigned to it. Roll them; whichever one ends up with a higher value wins. Virtue values can increase in this method (but not in method 1).

(3) Act in accordance to the virtue with a lower static value. That virtue's value goes up drastically more than in the case of rolling - we're trying to represent the character's beliefs changing drastically, here, because the player is simply choosing to act against the character's beliefs. It's like an anarchist suddenly waking up one day and wanting to be a cop, with no rhyme or reason.

The idea of ramifications of choice 3 has been thrown around, and I've met with great resistance on that topic, but making option 3 have negative ramifications elsewhere in the system seems the only way, to me, of at least hobbling the viability of author/pawn stance. The problem becomes that I have no idea how to implement such ramifications, nor what they would be; if it seems like that's the best course of action here, then I can go into more detail regarding the system as it stands, and hopefully a solution can be found.

The more this system pushes towards actor stance, the better, really. I don't know if this does that; I think it might be going towards it, but I'm not sure how much it encourages it.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Questions? I realize that I may need to provide more detail to allow for more reasonable discourse, so feel free to ask.

Hey there,

The way I see it, those three ways of doing things are fairly valid. They encourage the player to play the character as they have made him, and then allow for growth in the right directions if the player changes their mind. I would suggest only that option one have a minimal gain to it. To me this is justified for the following reason:

If players never wanted to play differently than what they have created (which seems to be what you are going for) their virtues will never increase. Compared to the other options, that makes option 1 sub-par. Players are actually encouraged to choose the other two because no gains can be made from option 1. Now, one way to handle this is to decrease ignored virtues instead of increasing the used ones. So, if a player rolls to determine what they do, and it goes against their current virtues, then ignored virtues go down and used virtues go up. If they blatantly ignore a virtue, the change is similar, but more drastic. In this way, the only way to make an actual gain would be option 1, which is playing the character properly.

So I think your best bet is to make the value go up and down with options 2 and 3, and rise only with option 1. This increases player incentive to play the characters the way they design them, but still allows for the character to grow and change over time.

Hope that helps,
--Norm

Hey Gnome,

I understand that you don't like some terminological aspects of play, but what behavior do you want to encourage in the player? What do you want them doing at the table?

Right now, in this system, you are encouraging players to game a numbers system for maximum benefit. Nothing that you've presented encourages a player to take the reins and play out a character's belief.

-L

I want to encourage the player to act as the character would, in whatever situations arise in-game.

However, at the same time, I recognize that there will be a lot of irritation if the system forces that kind of thing, so there also has to be the opportunity to not act according to character.

If I haven't managed to accomplish that, with what I've got here, then I suppose that means that there's something I'm not grokking. Is there a way to do it, reasonably?

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 06, 2009, 07:42:44 AM
I hate the crap out of pawn stance. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate the idea of a player using the character as nothing more than an avatar. It's so very MMO-like, and really, in my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of how things need to be done in an RPG.

I had no idea that there was a name for this, is there an article where these different stances are explained?

I'm actually considering using the pawn stance for a game. The character would have Strength and Agility but no Intelligence.  In some ways it's simpler and makes more sense. There's no need to rationalize the disconnect between a character's and a player's intelligence. It's like acknowledging that the game is simulation of your player's reactions and decisions in the context of new setting. Any deeper analysis definitely starts to put holes in the concept, but it's interesting to think about, at least.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 06, 2009, 11:15:34 AM
I want to encourage the player to act as the character would, in whatever situations arise in-game.

However, at the same time, I recognize that there will be a lot of irritation if the system forces that kind of thing, so there also has to be the opportunity to not act according to character.

If I haven't managed to accomplish that, with what I've got here, then I suppose that means that there's something I'm not grokking. Is there a way to do it, reasonably?

Oh my, you're questing for the immersionist Holy Grail.

Okay, work with me. Let's do a small RPG design exercise.

Imagine that there is no character, there's only the player and his behaviors and decisions. Now, given that, try to restate your goal.

-L

QuoteOh my, you're questing for the immersionist Holy Grail.

Okay, work with me. Let's do a small RPG design exercise.

Imagine that there is no character, there's only the player and his behaviors and decisions. Now, given that, try to restate your goal.

Ha! Figures. I'm not surprised that it's considered that.

I'm not sure if I get your example. The player is playing him/herself? In this instance, so long as the character has exactly the same life experiences as the player (nigh impossible, but not entirely so), this is totally acceptable.

If the player is acting as him/herself, then their actions need to line up with their past experiences - however, it is also possible for a person to suffer a sudden ephiphany regarding their beliefs, and as such they would also reasonably be able to change their beliefs on short notice.

Am I following you, or did I miss the point?

Sorry, I should have seen that one coming.

No. Check it out. You want to encourage the player to act as the character would. Okay, I grok that, but I think breaking it out is going to help you. So, the character never "would" do anything. The character doesn't act. The character doesn't exist outside of some notes on a piece of paper. It's nothing more than that sketch. There is no "situation in-game." There's only talking between the players. The player plays an RPG with that piece of paper in front of him, staring at those numbers and notes.

That's a very formalist view of a roleplaying game. I want to use that formalist structure to break your game down so you can tell me what players do at the table with your game. What's your game about? What keeps a player engaged? How does a player act on that engagement? It's not enough to say that you want the player to make difficult moral decisions. Technically, D&D has those mechanics built into alignment. But morality in D&D is a joke, right? Even if you see the in-game situation as your paladin would, it still doesn't ring true. You want something more. You want something that grabs the player's guts and squeezes. To get there, you need to look at your process of play and what types of behaviors it encourages. You've got to not only develop your fictional situations and your supporting mechanics, but you need to think very carefully how to get the player invested in these decisions.

It's freaking hard!

Hope that helps.
-L

I think it depends a good deal on individual personality, but I think extensive morality rules can cause a moral disconnect between character and player.  When you build guidelines like you have and punish the player for not following them you're basically building a morality robot.  The more rules for morality you have the more a character's actions are dictated by those rules and the less they are by the player's image of the character.  Hopefully the two will be fairly close to each other, but they'll never quite be able to represent each other completely.  I think a morality rule-set should be pretty good for encouraging consistent character action, but I think it might actually work against immersion for the players themselves.

I do think that morality rules can help encourage character-player empathy, but I think they need to be mechanics-light.  Their job should be more to force the player to think about their character's beliefs than to mechanically force the player to act them out.  If the player has a good idea of what their character's beliefs are like they'll probably stay accurate to them, mechanics or not.  If they aren't the extra rules won't make them empathize more with the characters, they'll just forcefully dictate moral actions for the character with minimal player input.

This reminds me in a way of something Ron stated some time back about Sorcerer, about the manner in which people would play the pre-gen characters for games at conventions, and how no two players of the same character would ever play the character the same way or make the same decisions.

When Ron would ask a player afterward why they had the character make a particular choice, the answer was always "because that's what the character would have done" and the player would explain exactly how the character's personality, desires, and background as listed on the sheet clearly led to their particular, unique decision for that character.

Your problem seems a lot like that, and your solution as though it is trying to describe how a character WOULD REALLY be played, so you can judge whether or not the character is being "appropriately" played...when the problem may well be that you're trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn't exist--that is: there is no "would really" deterministic model to judge from.

That is, in the above example--despite the unique decisions and methods of playing a specific character by different individuals--no one actually "did it wrong". So, it seems rather that you want people to role-play more, that is to get more into character and make character-centric decisions (and try to avoid OOC thinking). You want to encourage Actor stance.

But I'm not sure your proposed solution will achieve that.

I wonder if this might be more a social contract issue and less a mechanics issue--though I can't discount a using mechanical impetus towards use of Actor stance, either. I say that as, first, I'm not a fan of Actor stance so I've never tried to design such a thing, and second, I design and play games that encourage Pawn and Author stance so I would think it isn't entirely an issue of the behavior at the table (given it isn't in those cases).

Still, I think it is important to any eventual solution for you to separate out "would really" thinking (if indeed that is a part of the issue, as it seems to appear) from the goal of creating more in-depth role-playing/encouraging acting, because I think the one muddles the achievement of the other. Though as noted, I may be wrong about what you're expecting or perceiving, so feel free to ignore this if it isn't germane to working yourself towards a solution.

Quote from: Luke on April 07, 2009, 12:13:48 AMSo, the character never "would" do anything. The character doesn't act. The character doesn't exist outside of some notes on a piece of paper. It's nothing more than that sketch. There is no "situation in-game." There's only talking between the players. The player plays an RPG with that piece of paper in front of him, staring at those numbers and notes.

Sure, yep, this is the situation as it is. We want to go from here to some kind of immersion-thing.

QuoteWhat's your game about? What keeps a player engaged? How does a player act on that engagement?

The game as I envision it is not "about" anything. This is a phrase that seems to be used fairly often to describe RPGs, and it is not a concept that I grok. An RPG, in my mind, does not come with an "about," save that which the players and GM decide to give it.

Engaged? We play for the sake of playing, because it is an interesting thing to do. The idea that there needs to be more to it than that is somewhat baffling. Your third question here is something that I'm not even sure how to answer.

QuoteTechnically, D&D has those mechanics built into alignment. But morality in D&D is a joke, right? Even if you see the in-game situation as your paladin would, it still doesn't ring true.

The alignment system in D&D is rather full of fail, yes.

QuoteIt's not enough to say that you want the player to make difficult moral decisions. ... You want something more. You want something that grabs the player's guts and squeezes. To get there, you need to look at your process of play and what types of behaviors it encourages. You've got to not only develop your fictional situations and your supporting mechanics, but you need to think very carefully how to get the player invested in these decisions.

...what?

Somewhere along the line, I think you started attributing motives to what I'm trying to do, that aren't actually there.

"Difficult moral decisions" for the player? I don't care about the player's mindset; the player is irrelevant, save in the instances wherein player direction is required to determine the character's course of action. The mechanical construct that is the character requires a person behind it. At the same time, the player creates the mechanical construct that is the character and interacts with the world through it, with their choices hopefully being influenced by the personality and beliefs of the character. But the player empathizing with the character? Not a design goal here.

I have no interest in twisting the players. If something is a difficult decision for the character to make, insofar as that is a quantitatively-defined sort of difficulty, that is one thing. But the player's opinions or emotions regarding the matter border on the irrelevant.

Quote from: otspiiiTheir job should be more to force the player to think about their character's beliefs than to mechanically force the player to act them out.  If the player has a good idea of what their character's beliefs are like they'll probably stay accurate to them, mechanics or not.

Or would they? I'm not so sure. I think there would still be players that would buck against what their character would do, no matter how well they understand their character's beliefs.

These are the sort of people that I've been keeping in mind when trying to puzzle through this. That, and potentially new players who have never dealt with a tabletop RPG before; they may not necessarily have the depth of experience to grok how to separate their characters from themselves. We've got to enable that kind of distinction and help make it clear.

Quote from: greyormYour problem seems a lot like that, and your solution as though it is trying to describe how a character WOULD REALLY be played, so you can judge whether or not the character is being "appropriately" played...when the problem may well be that you're trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn't exist--that is: there is no "would really" deterministic model to judge from.

Sufficient knowledge and analysis of an individual's personality and past life experience would most likely be able to produce a relatively accurate probabilistic spread of probable actions given certain types of stimuli.

Yes, reality is a lot more complicated than can be reasonably modeled. The system is a rough abstraction; we do not understand enough about ourselves, in the real world, to even begin accurately modeling how fictional persons in a fictional setting would react to fictional circumstances. But we have rough ideas, and that is what this is meant to be. It would be impossible to attempt to catalog every possible kind of situation and set of stimuli and cross-reference them to every kind of belief to produce a predetermined result; thus, the compromise is a vaguely-deterministic system that also allows for player overrides.

Hey there Gnome,

Just wondering, but did anything in my post help you at all? It sort of got lost in your discussion about game motives and such. I'm just wondering if what I suggested sounds feasible or not to you, and whether you have any questions about my suggestion.

As for your player being irrelevant, I think thats not a problem at all. however, I think you are trying to aim your game at both simulationsists and at other types. As I understand, a Simulationist will have no problem getting in character and playing that character the way they think it should be played. Their decisions will rarely stray from their character's expected decision unless mechanically coaxed to. What I mean is this: a simulationist playing a paladin D&D has a strong mechanical urge to constantly look the other way while grave robbing and killing take place. If they didn't, their character would suffer and be almost un-playable. However, gamists and narrativists have no automatic loyalty to the way a character thinks, or at least, no to the degree a simulationist does. So, don't  worry about making your game for them. Make your game for simulationists, and state clearly what is expected of the player.

As for being worried about new players not grokking it, Thats where your mechanics should lightly coax them in the right direction, that is, acting as the character would, as they have made it. Again, I think my above suggestion for virtues changing up and down if ignored, and only going up for "accurate character portrayal" lends a stong enough push toward playing the character accurately from the sheet.

hope that helps,

--Norm

Hi GW,

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 06, 2009, 11:15:34 AMI want to encourage the player to act as the character would, in whatever situations arise in-game.

Does the GM decide whether the character would do that/whether it's in character, or does the player?

Gnome, forgive me for chuckling as I read your response. You made me smile.

Apparently, I've gone too deep into design speak for you. I apologize. I'm going to push it a bit further, though.

Based on what I'm reading from your posts, you seem to be at odds with your own design.

You indicate your game isn't "about" anything but you laid out a system of contrapuntal virtues and ethos around which the design is centered. If the game isn't about anything, why not just play poker and talk in funny voices? At least there's strategy to engage me there. You even cite Pendragon and then go on to assert you don't understand how games are about anything at all. I disagree. I think you understand what Pendragon is about, otherwise you wouldn't have set it as your baseline. All games are about something, even yours.

Your game lays out virtues like responsibility vs freedom. By definition that's an ethical or moral choice. Yet, you assert that, and I'm paraphrasing here, you're not interested in moral choices.

And I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

And how exactly do you think people make decisions? We make them on an emotional level. You intuitively recognize this by using virtues and ethos, but you're also denying this in your statements to me.

If you want to achieve your design goal, "a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever." the first step is to induce your player to care about the "beliefs about opposing ideas." I think if you marry your impulses, you'll have a stronger design. I think if you remain at odds with yourself here, your design will reflect it.

-Luke

Gnome, I think I undersatdn what you are getting at - and I think you may possibly have a problem in pursuing that in this community, and someone should probably step up and raise that possibility.

It shouldn't have to be said, but I will say it:  Everything that follows is either my impressions, my opinion, or both.  The same is true for everything everyone else says.

Also, the following by its nature is a generalization.  Generalizations aren't bad, they just are summations of populations that do not focus on the outliers.

The Forge isn't just an indie game community.  It's an indie game community with a certain overlapping shared basis of thinking about and coming at game design - or at least the active posters are.  They tend to focus on games that "go after" the players emotionally - they tend to value mechanics that encourage/enforce the player being highly emotionally involved in the process.  This can more times than not lead to games where the (player's) agony of defeat or loss - or the threat of such agony - is one of the main focuses.

Everything else - characters, attributes, alignments, dice, tokens, etc are tools to accomplish the emotional involvement of the player - again usually in a way that is less about enticement and entreaty (the "carrot") and more about the spectre of defeat and loss, and "emotional hostage-taking" (the "stick")

So when you are being asked about your game, it can be said to boil down to this: How do you motivate your players to want to do what you want them to?  How do you manipulate or coerce them to care about the character in the way that you want them to?

This is a basic design question that seems relevant to many Forge-ish game and game discussions that I have expereinced, and is rampantly prevalent as a substrate in most of the kind of design and fundamental approach to gaming here.

Personally, for me the most major warning sign is when they closed down the Theory forum.  Never did hear a good justification for that - just a repudiation of theory for theory's sake - which to me is no different from saying that you are not allowed to vote on issue affecting children unless you have one.  Ridiculous.  But that's my axe to grind.

Just wanted to give you fair warning based on my own experiences. (Actual play, as it were.) In this self-selecting group, I do not know that anyone is left at the Forge that would see the warts, much less point them out, so I felt obligated.  This place can yet have something to offer, but you have to know what you are walking into, to have the most benefit.

Feel free to PM me - I love game design discussion (why I spent a lot of time on the Theory forum before they shut it down) having been a gamer, GMer, modder and designer myself for over 30 years.

Cheers and good luck.

PS.  You cannot edit a post on the Forge once it has been submitted - if you see any spelling/typing mistakes in my posts, that is why.

Quote from: Sindyr on April 07, 2009, 10:33:16 AMIn this self-selecting group, I do not know that anyone is left at the Forge that would see the warts, much less point them out, so I felt obligated.  This place can yet have something to offer, but you have to know what you are walking into, to have the most benefit.

What does this have to do with this discussion?

Just trying to help the OP both get where the responses he is getting are coming from (as he seemed to indicated a perceived disconnect between his questions and the answers he is being given) and trying to help the OP have reasonable expectations and an understanding of the origin of the replies he is getting and that he is likely going to get. I knwo that in his position, I would consider myself well served with such a response, addressing the nature of the replies in order to better utilize them.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 07, 2009, 06:09:48 AM
Or would they? I'm not so sure. I think there would still be players that would buck against what their character would do, no matter how well they understand their character's beliefs.

These are the sort of people that I've been keeping in mind when trying to puzzle through this. That, and potentially new players who have never dealt with a tabletop RPG before; they may not necessarily have the depth of experience to grok how to separate their characters from themselves. We've got to enable that kind of distinction and help make it clear.

Why would they play your game, though, if it forces a play-style on them that they don't enjoy?

I guess I have a question for you.  Are you designing this more to encourage accurate character action or accurate character experience?  Is it more important to you that a character acts the way they "really would" during play or that the player experiences the situation through the eyes of the character?

The short version: what do you think will make the players care what about how conflicted their characters?

Typical answers: (these are not based on GNS)

The player makes up the character so will care about what the characters goals and experiences are.

The player makes up the conflicts, or the possible outcomes, and so will be interested in what occurs.

The player has many tactical options, and so puts personal rational effort into trying to produce an outcome (be it winning, or drama, or good gambling)

In the end, how do you want to get your players to invest some of themselves in the process so they feel a connection to play? To use the terms already used, why do you think the player will care about whether their character meets the goal of Romance or do they give that up to meet the goal of Feudal Duty? Or whatever the moral conflict du joue is. (See, that was a funny.) The idea that the players will provicde their own reason to be playing is a given, but it doesn't mean you can't address it, massage it, tailor your game to it and so on.

Quote from: Ayyavazi on April 07, 2009, 08:37:14 AMJust wondering, but did anything in my post help you at all? It sort of got lost in your discussion about game motives and such. I'm just wondering if what I suggested sounds feasible or not to you, and whether you have any questions about my suggestion.

Your suggestion pretty much matched what we're going with, at the moment - options 2 and 3 can cause change in the character's beliefs, but option 1 doesn't.

Was there more to your post that went over my head?

QuoteAs for your player being irrelevant, I think thats not a problem at all. however, I think you are trying to aim your game at both simulationsists and at other types. As I understand, a Simulationist will have no problem getting in character and playing that character the way they think it should be played. Their decisions will rarely stray from their character's expected decision unless mechanically coaxed to.

You have hit the nail on the head. This is a game being written by a simulationist, for simulationists.

QuoteAs for being worried about new players not grokking it, Thats where your mechanics should lightly coax them in the right direction, that is, acting as the character would, as they have made it. Again, I think my above suggestion for virtues changing up and down if ignored, and only going up for "accurate character portrayal" lends a stong enough push toward playing the character accurately from the sheet.

Well, if virtues go up when followed, that makes it harder for the character's opinion to change, which is why I'm leery of the virtues going up if the player simply follows the static values.

Quote from: Callan SDoes the GM decide whether the character would do that/whether it's in character, or does the player?

Generally it will be the player. I can envision a scenario in which a player acts wildly out of character, though, and the GM looks at the player and says, "Let me see your character sheet."

If the players need to be kept on a tight leash, regarding ethics, then the GM would probably check the characters' virtues every session. With more trustworthy and experienced players, that need goes away.

So, I guess the answer is - it's situational.

Quote from: LukeGnome, forgive me for chuckling as I read your response. You made me smile.

No offense taken?

QuoteApparently, I've gone too deep into design speak for you. I apologize. I'm going to push it a bit further, though.

Sure, just don't be surprised if I don't follow what you're saying...

QuoteBased on what I'm reading from your posts, you seem to be at odds with your own design.

There has been a bit of a feeling of that, yes.

QuoteYou indicate your game isn't "about" anything but you laid out a system of contrapuntal virtues and ethos around which the design is centered. If the game isn't about anything, why not just play poker and talk in funny voices? At least there's strategy to engage me there. You even cite Pendragon and then go on to assert you don't understand how games are about anything at all. I disagree. I think you understand what Pendragon is about, otherwise you wouldn't have set it as your baseline. All games are about something, even yours.

I used Pendragon as a baseline for my ethos system. That this is the subsystem upon which the game hinges seems a really strange assertion to me; admittedly this is the only thing that I have presented, but the whole is greater than just this.

QuoteYour game lays out virtues like responsibility vs freedom. By definition that's an ethical or moral choice. Yet, you assert that, and I'm paraphrasing here, you're not interested in moral choices.

I'm not interested in the players' concerns about moral choices. I am interested in the characters' concerns about moral choices. A player can have an immediate and strong moral reaction to a situation, while playing a character who would be conflicted; the reverse is also possible. In these situations, the player should act as the character would, their own opinions being irrelevant insofar as the game is concerned.

QuoteAnd I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

Yes, and I want the players to act as much like their characters as possible, yet with still providing for the opportunity for the player to act "outside the box," as it were.

QuoteAnd how exactly do you think people make decisions? We make them on an emotional level. You intuitively recognize this by using virtues and ethos, but you're also denying this in your statements to me.

I'm not even really sure I agree with that idea, that we make decisions on an emotional level.

With this concept, there is a right way and a wrong way to play the character. The character would act in certain ways in response to certain stimuli; it is not guaranteed, of course, but there is an action-set that is more probabilistically-likely than any other, and the character's action should be drawn from that set. The player's feelings on the matter are - and should be - irrelevant in the process.

QuoteIf you want to achieve your design goal, "a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever." the first step is to induce your player to care about the "beliefs about opposing ideas." I think if you marry your impulses, you'll have a stronger design. I think if you remain at odds with yourself here, your design will reflect it.

Hmm... is that the way to do it?

Thinking about my own experiences, I don't need to have emotional investment in a character's beliefs in order to follow through on them. Even characters whose opinions and such vary vastly from my own, it's much more of a logical process, on the player end: would the character do this, no, why, explanation points to another sort of action, would the character do that... and so on.

Also, there are players who just won't care. Or don't know how to care. These people need to be taken into account, as well.

Quote from: SindyrJust wanted to give you fair warning based on my own experiences. (Actual play, as it were.) In this self-selecting group, I do not know that anyone is left at the Forge that would see the warts, much less point them out, so I felt obligated.  This place can yet have something to offer, but you have to know what you are walking into, to have the most benefit.

I take any kind of design advice anyone gives me - anywhere, doesn't matter - with a large grain of salt. Largely because, even if I were to show someone the entirety of the system as it's written thus far, there are still pieces floating around in my head that aren't written. The framework might be on paper, but the spirit still isn't, and until I figure out how to express it in a way that makes sense, advice is going to be very iffy.

Also, I've been around the block a bit. I know that the Forge has a reputation. I had an idea of the kinds of advice I would find; even if the folks around here are as narrow in game design choices as that reputation would claim, there is still a use for it - there's a reason I brought this particular question here, because, if anybody could help me hammer it out, they would be here.

But thanks for the notice.

Quote from: otspiiiI guess I have a question for you.  Are you designing this more to encourage accurate character action or accurate character experience?  Is it more important to you that a character acts the way they "really would" during play or that the player experiences the situation through the eyes of the character?

That seems like a ridiculously fine distinction... but I think I get it.

Accurate character experience would be like... the player is thinking on the same wavelength as the character would? So if a player were playing a D&D-style paladin, for instance, that player would start thinking about the events in-game as the paladin would? This would reach a point where the system that set up the character's beliefs would become unnecessary, because the player would eventually - hopefully - embody those beliefs fully, right?

Whereas accurate character action would be more like... the player isn't thinking on the same wavelength as the character, but still taking the appropriate kinds of actions? So even if I'm an anarchist playing a D&D-style paladin, I can still do that without me personally being affected by my character's beliefs? I interact with in-game situations appropriately for the character, even though - as a player - I am rebelling against my every action?

If these are accurate definitions... the first one kind of scares me, a little. It's neat to an extent, when you start thinking like the character, but for a system to actively encourage it? That seems weird and slightly untenable, mechanically.

The second option seems much more reasonable, to me. And again, I'm not sure if the player's feelings on the matter are relevant.

Quote from: chance.thirteenTo use the terms already used, why do you think the player will care about whether their character meets the goal of Romance or do they give that up to meet the goal of Feudal Duty?

The virtues aren't so much goals as they are ethical guidelines. But I think that misses your point - why does the player care about following or breaking their character's virtues, right?

I'm not interested, really, in setting up situations in which a character becomes conflicted. I'm not interested in that kind of thing. When it happens, it's interesting, but it should arise naturally out of what's going on, not be forced - and because of that, I'm a lot less personally invested in what the decision or outcome is.

As a player, it's not about my feelings regarding the character's beliefs; it's about how the character feels regarding the character's beliefs. I - the player - might be certain about how a certain situation be resolved; the character might not be. As a player, I should be examining this in my head: why is the character conflicted? Are there any other beliefs the character has that can be brought into this analysis, that would sway the decision one way or the other? How does the character feel about the ramifications of following the courses of action available?

Does that address your point?

QuoteThe idea that the players will provicde their own reason to be playing is a given, but it doesn't mean you can't address it, massage it, tailor your game to it and so on.

What? No, we play for the sake of playing itself. There is no grander reason than that. There isn't, and there doesn't need to be.

Gnome,

I think people in this thread are trying to get you to see something about the play process that you're not seeing.  I know what they're getting at and I can see you're not seeing it.  I don't think I can help you see it so I'm going to try to help you from a different approach.  Consider this:

I play role-playing games to socially create a narrative that addresses real-world human issues that engage my personal emotions.  Without that, I don't want to play.  I've been in games where we just kind of socialized "in character" and they bored me.  Role-playing my character is not enough.  I have to be role-playing a character to a specific creative end.

Now that's just me.  If that isn't your thing, awesome.  I don't want to change your thing but I do want you to see that there are other things out there.  Now given the fact that *to me* a character is a bundle of emotionally charged fictional issues ready to be confronted by an equally emotionally charged fictional situation that resolves with thematic weight, I can comfortably say I've never made an "out of character" decision in my life.  Every time I've had my character do something, it's because it's what I believed he "would" do given the circumstances.  Most of my out-of-character decisions come in setting up the character and positioning him in a given situation but once that starting point is set (sometimes scene-by-scene in a given game) and the "Go" button is hit, I role-play him in the most believable manner possible.

In your post you talk about the characters in very Pavlovian terms.  The idea that given enough information about the character there exists a probabilistic curve of behaviors given a certain stimuli.  Okay, let's go with that.  I believe that is what you want and, again, I don't want to change your mind about that.  But this is my question: In play, who is the final arbiter of this curve?

Let me get more specific.  I'm sitting at your table.  I have my character takes action.  Who is the final arbiter of whether my character's action is "on the curve" given the situation?  Can the GM say, "No, your character would never do that?"  Can the group take a vote on whether my action is "on the curve?"  In other words, how do I, as a player of your game, know what actions are on and off the curve?

Because here's the thing: Likely given the same information you and I would not objectively agree on the same "shape" for the probability curve.  So, unless, you want a lot of out-of-character arguing at your table over what a given character's probably curve looks like you need some way of communicating it to the players across the group, up to and including simply vesting one person with the right to say "No, not on character's behavior probability curve."  Full stop.

Does that make sense?

Jesse

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 07, 2009, 05:40:49 PM
I'm not interested in the players' concerns about moral choices. I am interested in the characters' concerns about moral choices. A player can have an immediate and strong moral reaction to a situation, while playing a character who would be conflicted; the reverse is also possible. In these situations, the player should act as the character would, their own opinions being irrelevant insofar as the game is concerned.

QuoteAnd I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

Gnome,
I understand exactly what you're trying to do. What I'm trying to do is point you in a direction. Try to listen to what I'm saying. You must motivate a player to make decisions. You must induce a player to make decisions desirable and profitable within the context of the game. Insisting that a player will simply do as the character would isn't helpful.

And, disagree or not, choices are fraught with emotion. Logical decision is largely a fallacy. Check out this excellent RadioLab podcast about choice (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14).

And, Gnome, Sindyr, knock it off with the barely-veiled condescension about "the folks around here." I am talking about game design, I'm not trying to induct you into our cult or induce you to design a particular type of game. I'm talking about basic game design: you must motivate these players to make the types of decisions you desire.

-L

Quote from: Luke on April 07, 2009, 09:27:09 AM
All games are about something, even yours.

All games are about something, but they are not all about the same thing, or even the same kinds of things.  

Quote
And I'll say it again: Characters don't make decisions, players do. Characters don't play your game, players do. A character is a set of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper, nothing more.

Thats true and it's not true.  Of course, really there are only players, but equally, what is the point of playing a character at all if the character itself has no identity distinguishable from our own?  The character has to push back on the player - or at least, it does if one of the goals is to explore the minds of people other than ourselves.  So sometimes, it is entirely appropriate to have the character make decisions, or at very least prompt them.

QuoteAnd how exactly do you think people make decisions? We make them on an emotional level. You intuitively recognize this by using virtues and ethos, but you're also denying this in your statements to me.

To reduce everything we do to simplistic emotional twitching does not capture how people really work.  If that were true we would never agonise about conflicted choices, ones in which our reason and our emotions demand different actions.  So I don't think it makes much sense to obviate that kind of self-experience in design in favour of wallowing in chat-show angst.

QuoteIf you want to achieve your design goal, "a system that can enforce the character's beliefs on the player, but simultaneously allow the player to force the character to take an action even if it's against the character's ethos/beliefs/whatever." the first step is to induce your player to care about the "beliefs about opposing ideas."

The problem with that proposition is that if the characters concerned live in a world any different to our own, then learning to think like the character is an exercise in research which most people, rightly, are not going to undertake.  Surely it is entirely sensible to use the mechanics of play to represent concerns which would not be immediately apparent or impinge upon the way we are used to thinking?  Our habits of thought, the values espoused by our culture, are not universally applicable to all times and places, let alone imaginary ones.  Showing these issues mechanically is precisely how you induce the player to care, even think about in the first instance, these different concepts.  And it seems to me that if you don't do that, all you end up with is 21st century people in drag, unable to relate to or even understand the setting in which their characters move.

Quote from: jburneko on April 07, 2009, 06:48:15 PM
Now that's just me.  If that isn't your thing, awesome.  I don't want to change your thing but I do want you to see that there are other things out there.

Will you allow that Gnome may, in fact, already have considered those options and made a choice?  Because it seems to me that you are leaping to the conclusion that anyone who has a difference preference to your own just has not thought it through.

QuoteBut this is my question: In play, who is the final arbiter of this curve?

The author of the system.  That's precisely why the mechanics are being presented for discussion.

QuoteIn other words, how do I, as a player of your game, know what actions are on and off the curve?

By interacting with the mechanics incarnated on the character sheet.

Quote from: Luke on April 07, 2009, 07:08:03 PM
And, Gnome, Sindyr, knock it off with the barely-veiled condescension about "the folks around here." I am talking about game design, I'm not trying to induct you into our cult or induce you to design a particular type of game. I'm talking about basic game design: you must motivate these players to make the types of decisions you desire.

No, you are conflating your preference with basic design.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 07, 2009, 05:40:49 PM
And again, I'm not sure if the player's feelings on the matter are relevant.

Hrmm, I think this is where you differ with me, and it sounds like with a lot of the posters here, too.  It sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, like your ideal style of play is just creating a world and then staring into it and watching as logical conclusions play out within it.  You construct an artificial reality and then have things happen in it, and do your best to make sure that those things are realistic.

The problem that I have with it is that it just sounds like a way to kill time and that's it.  The world is imaginary, and no matter how hard you try it'll only ever be a shadow of reality so why is it important that it pretends to be realistic?  If you aren't trying to make the players care about the game as anything beyond a way to avoid boredom for a few hours then why should they play your game over any other RPG that's ever been created?  Why is your game more fun that, say, taking a nap?

Err, that sounds accusatory but I don't mean for it to be.  You wouldn't have built the system if you didn't feel like it had something worthwhile about it that would make it more fun to play than just sitting around with friends talking about nothing in particular.  The thing is, nobody can really give you any meaningful advice on how to improve your game until they understand what that thing is.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 07, 2009, 06:09:48 AMSure, yep, this is the situation as it is. We want to go from here to some kind of immersion-thing.

I think Luke is trying to point out that you can't truly immerse in something that doesn't exist, ie: there is no "there" to go TO. A character doesn't exist as a separate entity from the player, a character is only ever a series of choices and reactions on the part of the player made in reference to how that player believes an individual with certain defined qualities would react. It isn't its own thing or person, and can't ever be.

Thinking otherwise, that fictional characters really do exist independently, is a lot like thinking Batman really exists somehow. Nope. Batman is a collection of a set of traits that different people interpret and portray differently, even if those depictions are mostly the same on a basic level. But there is no real "Batman" to compare each of those interpretations against and say decisively "this is how Batman would REALLY react/think/behave" because there is no Batman, just an individualized perception.

Yes, there's a tendency to anthropomorphize the character-object (because that's what humans do), rather than accept that it is a puppet  you are making move via various strings with no inherent quality, will, or being-ness apart from you, or accept that it's movements are really just your movements in disguise. But the illusion that it is otherwise is what immersion seeks, which IMO is also what a good actor seeks in portraying a character, but without falling for the idea that they really are separate (that is, an actor knows he isn't "channeling" a different personality...because there's nothing TO channel). A good actor recognizes that fifteen different actors will portray the same character fifteen different ways because the character is only the actor's own expressed will, even if they each play him fundamentally the same.

Now, that is important to think about/know, but it doesn't really help you design your game unless that happens to be a mental barrier you are running into in creating workable mechanics. I'm not sure it is, so moving on.

QuoteSufficient knowledge and analysis of an individual's personality and past life experience would most likely be able to produce a relatively accurate probabilistic spread of probable actions given certain types of stimuli...we do not understand enough about ourselves, in the real world, to even begin accurately modeling how fictional persons in a fictional setting would react to fictional circumstances...

That is true, as clearly some behaviors are outside the boundaries of a person's expected behaviors. I definitely agree with that. My point was that what things are inside the boundaries of expected behavior are much wider than what might be believed, including at times completely conflicting choices or decisions that are all still feasible and realistic within the boundaries of that character: there is no necessarily "best" or "most true" choice, only a set of reasonably appropriate choices (which may vary depending on who is doing the viewing and portrayal, as they personally judge how the various character elements "would really" interact/respond/think).

I think you indicated that was something you understood in one of your replies above, so we're on the same page there. But I'm not sure if your system reflects the above, or if it tries to lock players into the idea that there is an optimal choice, rather than a set of such?

And no matter how wide or narrow those boundaries are, from my perspective, you can't really encourage immersive role-playing with the system as you are currently proposing it. I say that as the method you've suggested seems (to me) to be creating a game that doesn't encourage immersion but quite the opposite: one that involves people checking character sheets to see what their character would do, rather than engaging in the art of (essentially) improv acting and really getting into character.

This is because, by constantly being forced to ask themselves "What would my character do?" and checking a sheet, more distance is created from the character rather than less. The illusion of the character making its own decisions can still arise from that, but it does not arise through immersion. An immersive solution would help players get into character; otherwise, from my perspective, we're just doing Pawn stance with behavioral attributes instead of the other details or numbers on the sheet.

Assuming you want immersion as your goal, and not just pseudo-accurate character portrayal by whatever means: perhaps one place to start for you would be reading up on various schools and methods of acting, and the various training engaged in to get into and stay in character those various schools utilize, and that might lead to some ideas for how to help players get into their characters and role-play more. Because what you seem to be aiming at is recreating method acting for use in role-playing games.

If immersion is not what you're looking for (which one of your responses seems to indicate), then we're looking at Pawn stance based character portrayal: "According to the values listed on my sheet, I think my character would do THIS. So that's what he does." And we might need something more mechanical to support and encourage the use of the sheet for those reticent to do so or confused as to how to do so, or even what the benefit in play of doing so would be to them (though I suspect this latter type of player is not your target, in which case you can and should forget about catering to them or "solving" them in the rules).

My thought here, though, is that people who like to do what you are describing will like your game and won't need such rules, and people who don't aren't going to and won't use them anyways. You can't say "people should just do it because!" and then ask for rules that will encourage them to do it, because encouragement won't function without reason; if people already believe they should do it just because they should, they will.

Unless I am misunderstanding who you are trying to target with these rules (you seem to be wanting one group in some places, and worrying about another group in others)?

However, from what you've said, it seems more like you want something that looks like immersion from the outside, but functions like "check behavior against a virtue" on the inside (or really doesn't matter how it functions, as long as the output looks like immersion), ie: better "role-playing" as that term is sometimes defined. Is that accurate?

QuoteThe player's feelings on the matter are - and should be - irrelevant in the process.

Except they can't be irrelevant to the process, because the player's feelings are informing the character's feelings and their expression...or rather, ARE the character's feelings, given a character, by itself, has no "feelings". Which isn't to say the character must/will be portrayed in-line with the player's feelings/desires/beliefs, because that isn't what is being said, only that the idea that the player's brain--constructing a representation of the character's feelings--being irrelevant is kind of weird.

Frex, if I hate golf or cringe at violence, that is going to affect how I approach and play a character who loves golf and violence. Again, not to say I wouldn't be able to play such, but I am not irrelevant to the character at all. I think this is clear in that, if you look at the way method acting functions, you have to find ways to approach the character and feel like the character and choose the decisions the character would make based on your own experiences and feelings.

So I understand why you say, "I'm not even really sure I agree with that idea, that we make decisions on an emotional level," because it conflicts with your desire to have characters and players be wholly separate entities (though one of them isn't even an entity). Yet there are well-respected studies that bear out the truth that we usually react, and then decide to support our reactions with conscious arguments and rationalizations. Which is why method acting recognizes this and trains folks to use the actor's own internal histories and reactions to drive external expression of personalities often completely deviant from their own.

Quoteadmittedly this is the only thing that I have presented, but the whole is greater than just this.

True, but keep in mind your system influences play. If you have virtues, play will be (in part) about virtues, because that's part of the system. Just like if you have hit-points and combat rules, play will be about fights and injuries. Rules are like tools in a box, what sorts of tools you provide will determine what sort of thing is made. Simplistically, the mechanics you include in your game effect game play in much the same way as a box of hammers, nails and wood will lead to much different output than a box of wires, pliers, and capacitors.

And when someone says "about" they mean literally that, not some metaphorical literary high-froofroo post-modernist conceptualizing. So it confuses me that the question confuses you: D&D is about going into dungeons and killing stuff and gaining power. Vampire is about a secret society of vampires living hidden in the machinery of the modern world and their politics. Shadowrun is about robbing corporations in a grim high-tech future with elves and dragons. Or even more coarsely: You play an adventurer. You play a vampire. You play a cyber-criminal.

A setting-based or setting-less system without built-in situation--along the line of GURPS--is also about something, which depends on what the group using it decides to do with it and what rules from GURPS they choose to utilize in play. Though, in a broader sense, GURPS is about using a set of rules to try and (realistically) simulate individuals interacting in a chosen genre.

That is what is being asked when someone asks what your game is about, and it can change the specifics of the advice given.

One sort-of solution: have you read Sorcerer or The Riddle of Steel? Sorcerer grants bonus dice to actions for role-playing. You could do something similar with the virtues you've described, giving a player a minor bonus when the player chooses to have the character behave in-line with its concept. In this case, a person could still act outside of their behavioral proclivities or tendencies, but simply wouldn't have the bonus they would normally get (not a huge penalty, but a minor irritation, thus encouraging playing the character without overly penalizing them for not doing so).

There is a somewhat similar mechanic in TROS, if more specific, called Spiritual Attributes. These are personality descriptions that grant bonuses to a character who is acting in accordance with them, but which can be changed in play as necessary. They're a little more narratively-inclined than I suspect you would be interested in (passion, faith, loyalty, etc) but could be altered to work with a more Pendragon-ish style of personality traits.

I don't know that either is completely what you're looking for, but they may be something to start from.

-----

Also, Sindyr, Contra...quit trolling the thread, which is what shallowly-disguised pot-shots and pointless grievances are. Just because you see an opening to snark doesn't make you a truth-teller, it makes you an ass when it adds nothing germane to the topic (and no "But I was just WARNING them" isn't germane) regardless of any truly relevant material you might add.

Perhaps you don't even get why, but consistent behavior like this is also why at least one of you has ended up with a well-established reputation as a sniper and troll on multiple other design lists and forums, despite your other worthwhile contributions. Help out, don't just sit and play aloof site-critic and pretend that's truly helpful to solving Gnome's design issue. Seriously, guys, you're smart enough that you don't need to stoop to shit like this.

QuoteGenerally it will be the player. I can envision a scenario in which a player acts wildly out of character, though, and the GM looks at the player and says, "Let me see your character sheet."

If the players need to be kept on a tight leash, regarding ethics, then the GM would probably check the characters' virtues every session. With more trustworthy and experienced players, that need goes away.

So, I guess the answer is - it's situational.

The problem is is that you've envisioned a scenario in which a player acts wildly out of character. Of course in your own imagination that is the situation, because you specifically imagined the player to be out of character. But in real life, how do we physically measure whether that is the situation? If the player were running around the room, that can be physically measured. But measuring whether they are in character?

Currently whether the GM takes over the character seems to hinge on nothing that's physically measurable. If the GM were to take over at all, it'd be based on opinion only. Not situation. How it switches over to GM control is just opinion based, not situation based. Noting it because you don't want to tell people it's situation based when it's opinion based. Or I'd think so, anyway.

Long post incoming.

Quote from: jburneko on April 07, 2009, 06:48:15 PMI play role-playing games to socially create a narrative that addresses real-world human issues that engage my personal emotions.  Without that, I don't want to play.  I've been in games where we just kind of socialized "in character" and they bored me.  Role-playing my character is not enough.  I have to be role-playing a character to a specific creative end.

Cool beans, whatever works for you, man.

QuoteI don't want to change your thing but I do want you to see that there are other things out there.

That's fine; like I said, if it works for you, good ups. However, your reasons for playing and the things you want out of a game don't make sense to me. That doesn't mean "you're doing it wrong." It just means that I don't grok it, and I don't want to go that route.

QuoteIn play, who is the final arbiter of this curve?

Okay, lemme explain in more detail how this works.

There are forty virtues, each opposed to another, so a set of twenty pairs of virtues. Each virtue then itself is part of an ethos, which are currently denoted by color: white, blue, black, red, and green. Each ethos has eight virtues, four of which are opposed by another color (ie, white has four virtues opposed to black and four to red; red has four opposed to white and four to blue; and so on).

Each ethos has a general rating. This rating is expressed as a number that turns into a dice pool.

Each virtue has a general rating. This rating, also, is expressed as a number that turns into a dice pool.

When you check virtues against each other, you can (1) compare their average dice pool values and go with the one that's higher, (2) roll their dice pools and go with the one that gets higher, or (3) act against the first option and go with the virtue with lower value without having to deal with rolling.

In (2), if a virtue rolls over its average value, it gets 1 point towards increasing to the next rating. In (3), the opposed virtue (the one that's lower) automagically gets 2 points towards its next rating.

A virtue needs 5 points to reach its next rating.

As a functioning example: let's say that you're trying to make a decision that is steeped in conformity, a white virtue, opposed to liberty, a red virtue. Your white ethos rating is 3, your conformity value 2; your red ethos rating is 2, your liberty value 4.

These translate into the dice pools of 1d6+1d4 (6) for conformity, and 1d4+1d8 (7) for liberty, the numbers in parens being averages.

If you go with option (1), you take the averages and compare - in this case, 6 and 7. Liberty wins.

If you go with option (2), you roll them and compare. Obviously the possible results are quite large, but liberty will probibalistically win, though it's not guaranteed - somewhere in the 55-60% range.

If you go with option (3), you go with conformity, and your conformity rating might go up.

The system in total is a bit more complex than this - virtue ratings carry over to affecting the ethos they're a part of, and also negatively impact the ethos of its opposing virtue - but that should give the general idea.

In summary, the system itself is the final arbiter of the curve.

QuoteCan the GM say, "No, your character would never do that?"

No.

QuoteCan the group take a vote on whether my action is "on the curve?"

How... would that even be a reasonable thing to happen? No.

QuoteIn other words, how do I, as a player of your game, know what actions are on and off the curve?

By consulting your numbers. Yeah, they're abstract, but they kinda have to be.

QuoteDoes that make sense?

Oh yeah, totally. I think we do that. The game itself is the final arbiter. If the game says it makes sense, then yep, it does! And the game itself is flexible enough that pretty much anything is reasonable... whether or not that's a good thing, I don't know.

Quote from: LukeTry to listen to what I'm saying.

I'm trying, man. If I'm being particularly dense, trust me, it's not on purpose.

QuoteYou must motivate a player to make decisions. You must induce a player to make decisions desirable and profitable within the context of the game. Insisting that a player will simply do as the character would isn't helpful.

Yes, we'd like to motive the player to make decisions consistent with the character's beliefs.

The first and third sentences here, I get those. I don't get what you're trying to say in the second one.

QuoteAnd, disagree or not, choices are fraught with emotion. Logical decision is largely a fallacy. Check out this excellent RadioLab podcast about choice.

I whole-heartedly disagree with you, good sir.

Quote from: otspiiiIt sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, like your ideal style of play is just creating a world and then staring into it and watching as logical conclusions play out within it.  You construct an artificial reality and then have things happen in it, and do your best to make sure that those things are realistic.

Yes! This is exactly the goal.

There's more to it than that, though, which is complexifying this whole issue...

QuoteThe problem that I have with it is that it just sounds like a way to kill time and that's it.  The world is imaginary, and no matter how hard you try it'll only ever be a shadow of reality so why is it important that it pretends to be realistic?  If you aren't trying to make the players care about the game as anything beyond a way to avoid boredom for a few hours then why should they play your game over any other RPG that's ever been created?  Why is your game more fun that, say, taking a nap?

This is the problem.

If characters' actions are determined mechanistically, always, then there is no reason for a player to sit at the table. None whatsoever.

As the GM, I would greatly prefer it if all the things I have to control and deal with were mechanistically determined, or at least mechanically determinable.

However, a player needs to have some amount of control over their character, or else there's no reason to sit down at the table.

These are the conflicting ideals that I'm trying to reconcile.

QuoteErr, that sounds accusatory but I don't mean for it to be.  You wouldn't have built the system if you didn't feel like it had something worthwhile about it that would make it more fun to play than just sitting around with friends talking about nothing in particular.  The thing is, nobody can really give you any meaningful advice on how to improve your game until they understand what that thing is.

It sounds accusatory to you probably because it's not your shtick, which is fine. No offense taken!

Quote from: greyormI think Luke is trying to point out that you can't truly immerse in something that doesn't exist, ie: there is no "there" to go TO. A character doesn't exist as a separate entity from the player, a character is only ever a series of choices and reactions on the part of the player made in reference to how that player believes an individual with certain defined qualities would react. It isn't its own thing or person, and can't ever be.

The character can have independent fictional existence, as can the imaginary world in which the character exists.

Do these things really exist somewhere? No; they only have existence in our minds. But if we have a system for determining events and outcomes and such, then how it works is this: conceive of the world or character, following system parameters. When the fictional construct is completed as per the rules being used, do not interfere with the "internal" aspects of it from that point forward - those things are off-limits. You can poke and prod and interact, but you're trying to maintain the integrity of the fictional construct. If you fiddle with it internally, you disrupt the integrity of it and destroy any meaning it had.

Does that clear up how I'm looking at things?

QuoteI think you indicated that was something you understood in one of your replies above, so we're on the same page there. But I'm not sure if your system reflects the above, or if it tries to lock players into the idea that there is an optimal choice, rather than a set of such?

Check out the more detailed presentation of the system, earlier in this post; hopefully that will help answer this question.

QuoteAnd no matter how wide or narrow those boundaries are, from my perspective, you can't really encourage immersive role-playing with the system as you are currently proposing it. I say that as the method you've suggested seems (to me) to be creating a game that doesn't encourage immersion but quite the opposite: one that involves people checking character sheets to see what their character would do, rather than engaging in the art of (essentially) improv acting and really getting into character.

I don't know if this is a good or bad thing...

QuoteThis is because, by constantly being forced to ask themselves "What would my character do?" and checking a sheet, more distance is created from the character rather than less. The illusion of the character making its own decisions can still arise from that, but it does not arise through immersion. An immersive solution would help players get into character; otherwise, from my perspective, we're just doing Pawn stance with behavioral attributes instead of the other details or numbers on the sheet.

Hmm...

After a time, however, I would think that the numbers on the sheet would more deeply solidify in the player's mind, and you would stop having to check the sheet. It's like learning to play a piece of music; after awhile, you stop needing the sheet music and can simply play from memory.

QuoteAssuming you want immersion as your goal, and not just pseudo-accurate character portrayal by whatever means: perhaps one place to start for you would be reading up on various schools and methods of acting, and the various training engaged in to get into and stay in character those various schools utilize, and that might lead to some ideas for how to help players get into their characters and role-play more. Because what you seem to be aiming at is recreating method acting for use in role-playing games.

Hrm, possibly.

Quote...then we're looking at Pawn stance based character portrayal: "According to the values listed on my sheet, I think my character would do THIS. So that's what he does."

How is that Pawn stance?

My interpretation of Pawn is that the player simply acts through the character; the character is basically a glove into the fiction, and the player occupies it. The glove doesn't do things on its own or start the conversation of what to do. The system I've presented can sometimes call for the character to make an action that the player is not interested in.

That would seem to be completely antithetical to Pawn stance.

QuoteUnless I am misunderstanding who you are trying to target with these rules (you seem to be wanting one group in some places, and worrying about another group in others)?

I'm trying to account for multiple types of people.

(1) People who are looking for the sort of game that this is. Even so, not all of them are necessarily able to think like the character, or fully consider what the character is like and how they think about the world. The mechanics assist in that regard, and provide mechanical guidelines.

(2) People who are utterly unable or refuse to roleplay. The hope is that this system would force at least some semblance of it upon them.

(3) People who have no idea what they're doing - namely, people new to the hobby who happen upon this game first. We want to help them figure out how to roleplay. This acts as a guideline for that.

QuoteHowever, from what you've said, it seems more like you want something that looks like immersion from the outside, but functions like "check behavior against a virtue" on the inside (or really doesn't matter how it functions, as long as the output looks like immersion), ie: better "role-playing" as that term is sometimes defined. Is that accurate?

That... looks like an apt description of what is going on here. I'm not sure if it's what I want, but it sounds accurate as to what I've presented thus far.

Quote from: Callan S.If the GM were to take over at all, it'd be based on opinion only.

No, that's not the point of the GM looking at the character sheet.

You can act wildly against character. Basically the GM looking at the sheet would simply be to ensure that the player is modifying the character's virtue and ethos values appropriately.

So if I choose to lose now, I get a benefit later? That's a decent mechanic, but there still has to be more than that to entice a player to throw a challenge. Especially since risking a roll on a higher valued attribute offers a substantial chance of advancement, which, since the favored ability is already at least 1 higher than the unfavored one, nullifies the benefit of using a losing ability at least once. So using a losing ability is a long term gamble.

Also, just a question, do you think that terms like virtue, ethos, liberty and conformity have meaning to players outside of your game? Would you agree that these are loaded terms?

-L

Oh, okay.  Your anti-pawn rant in the begging made me imagine the rules were a little harsher than they really are.  I think I understand things here a little better.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 08, 2009, 12:36:18 AM
If characters' actions are determined mechanistically, always, then there is no reason for a player to sit at the table. None whatsoever.

As the GM, I would greatly prefer it if all the things I have to control and deal with were mechanistically determined, or at least mechanically determinable.

However, a player needs to have some amount of control over their character, or else there's no reason to sit down at the table.

These are the conflicting ideals that I'm trying to reconcile.

This actually gave me an idea I really liked.

I think what I haven't liked so far is that the system is all about choosing action directly, basically ripping the reigns out of the player's hands and putting them in the dice's.  That's no fun because it means there's almost no reason for the player to even show up to the table.  I think it could work really well with NPCs, especially if you somehow made the focus of the game related to confronting the virtues of others and changing them to more match your own.  For example, confronting the king who leans too far to conformity and has become totalitarian, and convincing him to take a step towards moderation.  For the king's actions to be completely dice-based would probably be acceptable and possibly even desirable to your target audience.

It doesn't work so well for players, though.  Dictating a PC's actions directly is alienating.  However, you can still influence the PC's actions with the rules without totally stealing control.  You just have to give incentives.  You're part way there with your option three, but I think the flip side should work too.  Like, whenever a character performs an action they really believe in they can wager their virtue on it.  It gives them a bonus to the die roll, representing the confidence and conviction that gives them the extra energy to really excel.  If they succeed there's a small chance it goes up as their faith is reaffirmed, if they fail there's a chance it goes down as their faith is shaken.  Taking the bonus or not should probably be optional, but players will use it a lot because it helps them.

However, if the character acts against their virtues they should probably suffer a penalty to the roll, representing the nagging self-doubt that slows their action and makes them waver.  If they succeed despite the penalty their virtues suffer some amount of upheaval, while if they fail their virtues are reaffirmed.  This is kind of like the way option three works right now, and should probably be automatic.

There's a lot of fiddling you could do with all of what I just said, but the basic idea of it is just that if you reward players with dice for acting the way you want them to they will a) usually act the way you want and b) will be happy because they're getting dice.  The way you have it right now will make characters act the way you want, but it'll probably make players unhappy in the process.  Just remember that you don't need to drag the players to the type of play you want.  It's much more fun for all parties involved if you lead them there, instead.

Of course, there will be players who still just ignore their motivations and refuse to act in character.  Fuck 'em.  They aren't going to play your game, and if they did they probably wouldn't have fun (since the game runs so contrary to the way they like to play), so you don't need to worry about them.  I think a little nudge from bonuses and penalties is all you'll need to train new players, and your target audience will play the way you want no matter what the rules you set are.

I do like the 5-realms morality idea a lot, actually.  The way the five spheres interact without being black and white could work out really cool.  You should understand, though, that if this part of the game is as sophisticated and as complicated as it is it will be the main focus of play.  Like was said before, if there are a ton of combat rules for a system players will want to get in fights.  If there are a ton of morality rules in the game the players will want to get into morally challenging situations.  I think this game could be really fun if you work with that fact and use it to energize play.

Quote from: Luke on April 08, 2009, 01:14:23 AMSo if I choose to lose now, I get a benefit later? That's a decent mechanic, but there still has to be more than that to entice a player to throw a challenge. Especially since risking a roll on a higher valued attribute offers a substantial chance of advancement, which, since the favored ability is already at least 1 higher than the unfavored one, nullifies the benefit of using a losing ability at least once. So using a losing ability is a long term gamble.

Your terms here confuse me, a bit. You're not "losing," at least not insofar as I understand the term. You're sacrificing belief in one thing to believe in another.

The virtue things aren't really what I'd call a "challenge," either.

But I'm glad that you like it!

QuoteAlso, just a question, do you think that terms like virtue, ethos, liberty and conformity have meaning to players outside of your game? Would you agree that these are loaded terms?

We're throwing around the possible term "axiom" to replace "virtue," but personally I like the connotations of virtue - the idea that this ideal is important to the ethos, and is a good thing to possess. The virtue of amorality exists, which is a virtue of black; opposed by the virtue of morality, upheld by white. So far as black is concerned, having amorality is a virtue - it is a good thing to do, within the black ethos.

It's all very subjective, which I like. We've got shades of gray, which is - in my opinion - how the world is.

Yep, they're loaded terms. That's okay; they probably should be. We'll try to have working definitions as this system gets more solidifed - what does it mean, for instance, for a situation to be liberty vs conformity, as opposed to - say - certainty vs creativity, or responsibility vs freedom, or curiosity vs ignorance?

Quote from: otspiiiOh, okay.  Your anti-pawn rant in the begging made me imagine the rules were a little harsher than they really are.  I think I understand things here a little better.

Rock on.

QuoteI think it could work really well with NPCs, especially if you somehow made the focus of the game related to confronting the virtues of others and changing them to more match your own.  For example, confronting the king who leans too far to conformity and has become totalitarian, and convincing him to take a step towards moderation.  For the king's actions to be completely dice-based would probably be acceptable and possibly even desirable to your target audience.

The ability to use this system to represent an NPC's beliefs was very important to me. As a GM, I want no hand in deciding how NPCs react to things. I will set up the initial conditions for the NPC, yes, including possibly what their beliefs look like - but how they react to something? I want the NPC to tell me that; I don't want to decide it arbitrarily.

I'll set up the initial conditions, but after that, I only want to turn the crank. My role as GM, at the table, should largely be as interface to the world and arbiter of rules. Some things have to be crafted on the fly, yes, but that should follow the same rules - set up initial conditions, then turn the crank.

QuoteLike, whenever a character performs an action they really believe in they can wager their virtue on it.  It gives them a bonus to the die roll, representing the confidence and conviction that gives them the extra energy to really excel.  If they succeed there's a small chance it goes up as their faith is reaffirmed, if they fail there's a chance it goes down as their faith is shaken.  Taking the bonus or not should probably be optional, but players will use it a lot because it helps them.

Hmm... that's an interesting idea.

QuoteHowever, if the character acts against their virtues they should probably suffer a penalty to the roll, representing the nagging self-doubt that slows their action and makes them waver.  If they succeed despite the penalty their virtues suffer some amount of upheaval, while if they fail their virtues are reaffirmed.  This is kind of like the way option three works right now, and should probably be automatic.

But then you punish the player for trying to represent a sudden and drastic change in the character's beliefs, which is something we want to avoid doing too much of.

QuoteThere's a lot of fiddling you could do with all of what I just said, but the basic idea of it is just that if you reward players with dice for acting the way you want them to they will a) usually act the way you want and b) will be happy because they're getting dice.

I wouldn't want to reward virtues in a mechanical way that would make it too easy to game the system, though.

QuoteOf course, there will be players who still just ignore their motivations and refuse to act in character.  Fuck 'em.  They aren't going to play your game, and if they did they probably wouldn't have fun (since the game runs so contrary to the way they like to play), so you don't need to worry about them.  I think a little nudge from bonuses and penalties is all you'll need to train new players, and your target audience will play the way you want no matter what the rules you set are.

I don't want to cut the system off from players of that stripe, though. I want to still make it accessible to that kind of player, even if I'm not a fan of their style.

QuoteI do like the 5-realms morality idea a lot, actually.  The way the five spheres interact without being black and white could work out really cool.

Thanks! I should admit, though, that I pretty much wholly stole the base idea from the Magic CCG. The virtues are a combination of things taken from various official descriptions of the colors, and some additions of my own.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, and such...

Your second point is why I decided to do it, though. I don't like black-and-white morality systems, and this seemed like a really solid way of looking at things.

QuoteYou should understand, though, that if this part of the game is as sophisticated and as complicated as it is it will be the main focus of play.  Like was said before, if there are a ton of combat rules for a system players will want to get in fights.  If there are a ton of morality rules in the game the players will want to get into morally challenging situations.  I think this game could be really fun if you work with that fact and use it to energize play.

Oh yes, I am well aware of the fact that system implies how the game is played. Very well aware.

This is why we have intricate mechanics for everything. This system co-exists with (1) an intricate combat system, (2) an intricate social combat system, (3) an intricate magic system, and (4) an intricate crafting system.

And that's just on the player side of the screen.

QuoteThe character can have independent fictional existence, as can the imaginary world in which the character exists.

This made me chuckle as it reminded me of a quote from The Fairly Godparents cartoon that always leaves me rolling: "Those are real fictional people in real fictional danger!" But your second paragraph clears up your meaning, and I don't think it actually disagrees with anything I stated, so it appears we're on the same page.

QuoteAfter a time, however, I would think that the numbers on the sheet would more deeply solidify in the player's mind, and you would stop having to check the sheet.

Depending on the player, their image of the character might be strong enough anyways that they don't need to check the sheet, but if it isn't, I agree there's a good possibility that will come with time, dependent upon the player's personality and dedication to the game (I've had players who show up every week and don't know what any their character's skills are from session to session, they're just there to socialize and roll some dice).

But, there are forty virtues in your game. I don't know that I could memorize forty variables, or even twenty, and keep them all in mind while playing. Certainly some might stick, and some might be numbers I have to look up all the time.

QuoteMy interpretation of Pawn is that the player simply acts through the character; the character is basically a glove into the fiction, and the player occupies it. The glove doesn't do things on its own or start the conversation of what to do.

You know what, you're right. I mixed up Pawn stance with something else (DOH!). But from where I'm sitting, saying, "Ok, my loyalty is 4, so I immediately rush to the aid of my lord against the orcs" isn't role-playing, either, at least not the kind you're looking for?

But this is interesting, I like what you are trying to do conceptually. My own game, ORX, whose system I wrote with Gamism in mind (and originally Pawn stance, though it can shift around), has the rule: "Your orc is not a paper doll for your ego." And it works according to the principle that before you take an action, you roll the dice. Then you role-play (or rather, narrate) the outcome arising from that roll, not on what you as a player wanted your orc to do or try. If you play using this aspect of the rules, it requires acting chops.

QuoteThe system I've presented can sometimes call for the character to make an action that the player is not interested in.

However, I admit I am having great difficulty imagining how your game works, or rather how the virtues and ethos are actually utilized in play. Not how they function mechanically, you've explained that pretty clearly, but how they are actually utilized with real people sitting around a table in the middle of a game with things happening, and then the virtues system fires up because...why?

By which I mean it is all good to say a situation arises where freedom is opposed by conformity so then you do this...but what does that look like in play? Does the GM just say, "OK, make a freedom roll!" In D&D, for example, it is very clear when the combat system kicks into play. What event triggers its use. That's what I'm looking at.

Also, how does it actually work, rather than just being a bunch of numbers on a sheet that can serve as a guideline? And when does that guideline come into play? Because I guess I'm also not seeing how this system actually helps your goals of teaching role-playing or producing it in someone not interested in or unable to grok their character. Right now, I'm kind of looking at it as "alignment, but with numbers" and so about as easily ignorable as such, and not really foundationally wedded to the game.

Is there more to it? Can you help me out and run through a complete account of how this would be used to teach a new role-player to play during the game, or how it would force someone to role-play who isn't interested in doing such (exactly what it would make the character do).

Quote from: greyormThis made me chuckle as it reminded me of a quote from The Fairly Godparents cartoon that always leaves me rolling: "Those are real fictional people in real fictional danger!" But your second paragraph clears up your meaning, and I don't think it actually disagrees with anything I stated, so it appears we're on the same page.

Heh, fair enough. I realize that my position can sound rather ridiculous if I don't explain it right, so I'm glad that you're grokking what I'm saying.

QuoteBut, there are forty virtues in your game. I don't know that I could memorize forty variables, or even twenty, and keep them all in mind while playing. Certainly some might stick, and some might be numbers I have to look up all the time.

The general idea, in my head, seems to be that you would generally focus on one or two ethoi, and perhaps as many as half of the virtues important to each. So you'd probably generally care about eight, and their opposites.

I realize that's still quite a number, but the hope would be that they're intuitive enough that it's reasonable.

QuoteYou know what, you're right. I mixed up Pawn stance with something else (DOH!).

Ah, no big. Though that does make our earlier conversation more sensical.

QuoteBut from where I'm sitting, saying, "Ok, my loyalty is 4, so I immediately rush to the aid of my lord against the orcs" isn't role-playing, either, at least not the kind you're looking for?

Um... it *could* be. It's close enough that I'd be alright with it?

Personally, it wouldn't make me happy. But it'd be better than the player simply acting as himself, which is what we're trying to avoid. The player is at least taking the character's beliefs into account. That might lead to the player thinking more about the character and their motivations and beliefs... that might just be a pipe dream, but hey, you never know.

QuoteBut this is interesting, I like what you are trying to do conceptually. My own game, ORX, whose system I wrote with Gamism in mind (and originally Pawn stance, though it can shift around), has the rule: "Your orc is not a paper doll for your ego." And it works according to the principle that before you take an action, you roll the dice. Then you role-play (or rather, narrate) the outcome arising from that roll, not on what you as a player wanted your orc to do or try. If you play using this aspect of the rules, it requires acting chops.

Right, and basically what we're trying to do here is apply that to character actions, too.

QuoteHowever, I admit I am having great difficulty imagining how your game works, or rather how the virtues and ethos are actually utilized in play. Not how they function mechanically, you've explained that pretty clearly, but how they are actually utilized with real people sitting around a table in the middle of a game with things happening, and then the virtues system fires up because...why?

And that, good sir, is the question (or one of them, at least; we have a lot of "the question" questions).

What triggers a virtue roll? I don't know. Obviously not everything can, or else it gets rapidly unwieldy, and probably in an exponential fashion. However, they can't come up rarely enough that the system doesn't have an impact - if it doesn't matter, why do we have it?

There's a middle ground, I'm sure of it. But I'm not sure where, how to find it, or even how to look.

QuoteBy which I mean it is all good to say a situation arises where freedom is opposed by conformity so then you do this...but what does that look like in play? Does the GM just say, "OK, make a freedom roll!" In D&D, for example, it is very clear when the combat system kicks into play. What event triggers its use. That's what I'm looking at.

Yeah... I don't even really know.

Combat, social combat, crafting, and magic are all fairly obvious, as to when their subsystems kick in.

This? Not so much.

I know - or at least have an inkling - that this subsystem will interact with the social combat system in fun and interesting ways. As to what it's for on it's own, again, I don't know how to use it.

QuoteAlso, how does it actually work, rather than just being a bunch of numbers on a sheet that can serve as a guideline? And when does that guideline come into play? Because I guess I'm also not seeing how this system actually helps your goals of teaching role-playing or producing it in someone not interested in or unable to grok their character. Right now, I'm kind of looking at it as "alignment, but with numbers" and so about as easily ignorable as such, and not really foundationally wedded to the game.

Um... it's alignment, but with numbers, and more complicated axes?

The idea is that this is a lot more descriptive than D&D-style alignment. What the hell does it mean to be "chaotic good," anyway? With this, it's more like... well, you have a 1d8+1d4 (7) conformity, but a 1d10+1d8 liberty (10), so you're a bit divided on the issue, but you've thought about it more than most, and decided that liberty is generally more important than conformity.

The scale goes from 0 to yes, so you have to take the numbers and assign them meaning in relation to each other, with the idea that higher numbers means that you've thought about it more and/or have more experience with that virtue and so understand how it relates to situations and/or the strength of your belief in it. So while a 2 and a 4 are roughly as close as a 28 and a 30, the higher number set you have thought about a *lot* more.

Is this addressing your question, or am I missing the point?

QuoteIs there more to it? Can you help me out and run through a complete account of how this would be used to teach a new role-player to play during the game, or how it would force someone to role-play who isn't interested in doing such (exactly what it would make the character do).

I... really can't. I don't know. This subsystem was only written rather recently (in the last week or two), and it has yet to be actually tested - primarily because we don't really have anything to test. We don't have a method for implementing it; it exists, it has mechanics, but there's no way to interact with it because we don't have an implementation.

I mean, if I knew the answers to these questions, I probably wouldn't be posting about this here right now.

Quote from: greyorm on April 08, 2009, 05:18:18 AM
But from where I'm sitting, saying, "Ok, my loyalty is 4, so I immediately rush to the aid of my lord against the orcs" isn't role-playing, either, at least not the kind you're looking for?

That seems perfectly plausible to me.  Compare with the Honour system in L5R; the system serves as a prompt for the setting-appropriate behaviour.  Look at the tradition that a lords retainers should not survive the death of their lord, but die bravely over his corpse if necessary - not a thought thats likely to cross the modern mind unprompted.  Surely, we say instead, I should get away to fight again, or to take revenge.  Having the system prompt the player about the values that inform the culture they inhabit, and which the character, if not the player, should/would have internalised, therefore brings to their attention the expectations implicit in the setting.

That is, indeed, ROLE playing - playing a role other than your yourself, one with different experiences and motives.

I think contracycle provides a great example.

You decide to brawl? Combat system kicks in.
You decide to create something? Crafting system kicks in.
You decide to perform magic? Magic system kicks in.
You decide to argue? Social system kicks in.
You decide to make up your mind? Virtue system kicks in.

Combat, crafting, magic, and social are systems you use when you have already decided what to do. Virtue is the system that you use when doing the deciding itself.

Your lord just died in battle. What do you do? Revenge? Flee? Join him in death? You don't just act on a whim, you consult your character's virtues. For this to work though, you need to know what actions virtues would translate to in that situation. You need a map from virtues to setting.

At least, that's how I imagine it could be working.

Quote from: Jasper Flick on April 08, 2009, 06:47:50 AM
I think contracycle provides a great example.

You decide to brawl? Combat system kicks in.
You decide to create something? Crafting system kicks in.
You decide to perform magic? Magic system kicks in.
You decide to argue? Social system kicks in.
You decide to make up your mind? Virtue system kicks in.

Combat, crafting, magic, and social are systems you use when you have already decided what to do. Virtue is the system that you use when doing the deciding itself.

Your lord just died in battle. What do you do? Revenge? Flee? Join him in death? You don't just act on a whim, you consult your character's virtues. For this to work though, you need to know what actions virtues would translate to in that situation. You need a map from virtues to setting.

At least, that's how I imagine it could be working.

I really like this idea. The problem is determining how many of these systems your game needs. It could easily become a game system that is full of mini games, each of which has their own rules set. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, it just seems like a lot of work to create and a lot of learning for the players. It seems like this is the reason why most game systems tend to try to create one conflict or task resolution system to accomplish everything.

Well, this topic sure has been busy in my absence.

There is one thing about my suggestions you aren't grokking, but its because I didn't explain it explicitly. Gamists will possibly play your game. With your current Morality system, they will possibly break your game. Here's the key question: Are your resolution mechanics for conflicts and tasks based on your 40 morality stats, or are there seperate stats to govern them?

This is important because if resolution and success or failure is determined based on strictly the morality stats, your game will be broken, and here's how. Lets say I want to raise a morality. In your system, all I have to do is get into a situation where the prevailing morality is prevalent, and then outright deny my character's written impulse. Boom! 2 points in the morality I wanted raised. I can then do this as often as I need, and gradually my character will have very high values in everything.

If your resolution system for tasks and conflicts has nothing to do with your morality, then why make it from 0 to yes in the first place? That just means taking the random option (2) gets harder and harder and requires more dice rolling as the game progresses. Eventually people will need to roll 10 or 15 dice to figure out what they do, and that creates a big handling time, which slows the game down and reduces immersion. If your morality system is linked but not solely responsible for resolution, as in bonus dice, how is it? Do you benefit from being middle of the road more than dedicated? And if so, what kind of impetus would I as a player have for playing the disadvantaged type?

Thats the reason I keep insisting on raising and lowering values. This way, there is no net gain from using your character as an avatar, which is what your game might actually encourage, to a gamist. They won't be trying to break your system. They'll be trying to succeed, and in so doing, use your system in ways it wasn't designed to be. If the only net gain results from accurately playing your character, then people will more often accurately play their character. And so what if that makes it harder to change using the random method? Shouldn't it be harder? The longer something remains a habit, the harder it is to kick. Besides, the player can take the outright denial route and still change their character in the direction they want, and actually get there faster, than if they had rolled, both in game time and in play time (since no rolling is involved). In fact, you may want to consider eliminating option 2 entirely. Why roll in the first place? Is it because the player doesn't know what they want the character to do, or is it because they want to act contrary to their nature but don't want their morality to shift by the greater degree? I don't forsee option 2 as being desireably often enough to warrant its inclusion.

If your morality mechanics are completely divorced from your resolution mechanics, then using the raise and lower method is still a good idea because it keeps numbers manageable, which reduces handle time and the number of dice that have to be rolled. These are all good things.

If anything I've said is unclear, feel free to ask. And as for the system itself, I love how its shaping up. It sounds likle a really interesting system, and it doesn't matter that it originated from MtG. I would be interested in getting a list of the moralities you use, since my own game deals with morality heavily, though in a different way than yours.

Cheers!
--Norm

Quote from: mjbauer on April 08, 2009, 11:43:29 AMI really like this idea. The problem is determining how many of these systems your game needs. It could easily become a game system that is full of mini games, each of which has their own rules set. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, it just seems like a lot of work to create and a lot of learning for the players. It seems like this is the reason why most game systems tend to try to create one conflict or task resolution system to accomplish everything.

The game "requires" all of them, insofar as they are all things that can be done in a fictional setting, and therefore rules must exist to cover these situations, so far as I am concerned.

Each subsystem is relatively self-contained, and can be finetuned in terms of complexity. If you don't want to deal with combat in your instance of the game, you can do that. If you want combat in all its gritty detail, you can do that. The system supports that kind of scalability of complexity.

Personally I find the term "mini-games" to be generally kind of condescending, but in this case, it fits. Rather well, actually.

All subsystems use the same base mechanic for determining their values - that is, the rating system I talked about upthread, for virtues and ethoi, is used throughout the entire system.

Quote from: AyyavaziThere is one thing about my suggestions you aren't grokking, but its because I didn't explain it explicitly. Gamists will possibly play your game. With your current Morality system, they will possibly break your game. Here's the key question: Are your resolution mechanics for conflicts and tasks based on your 40 morality stats, or are there seperate stats to govern them?

The ethos subsystem is just that - a subsystem, almost entirely separate from the rest of the system. Your ethos has no impact on how well you swing a sword, sling a spell, or shape a spear (bonus points for alliteration?).

It *may* be tied to the social combat system, but as I mentioned earlier, I really only have an inkling of how that will work. I like the idea, though, and it would seem to resolve some of the issues we had in the social combat system.

QuoteIf your resolution system for tasks and conflicts has nothing to do with your morality, then why make it from 0 to yes in the first place? That just means taking the random option (2) gets harder and harder and requires more dice rolling as the game progresses. Eventually people will need to roll 10 or 15 dice to figure out what they do, and that creates a big handling time, which slows the game down and reduces immersion.

I... don't think it will get to that point.

Bear in mind that the base mechanic of the system is designed to go from 0 to yes, no cap. Ethoi and virtues, though, tend to have an effective cap, because when you increase a virtue, the rating of the ethos it is opposed to gradually decreases (not the virtue it opposes - the ethos of the virtue it opposes). I'm not sure how that will play out, but I think the back-and-forth nature of it will make the dice pools not too unwieldy (probably two sets of opposed 2d12, at most, I'd imagine). I can't envision it going higher than that.

QuoteIf your morality system is linked but not solely responsible for resolution, as in bonus dice, how is it? Do you benefit from being middle of the road more than dedicated? And if so, what kind of impetus would I as a player have for playing the disadvantaged type?

Alright, I'll elaborate on how I think the ethics system would impact social combat.

In social combat, each participant has social hit points - these social hps are a representation of your resistance to changing your opinion regarding the issue at hand.

The idea would be that social combats are centered around a pair of opposed virtues, and so your social hit points for that social combat would be your virtue's rating.

In this case, being stronger in your beliefs, and not waffling on them, leads to you not being swayed towards an argument. If you waffle, you are a lot more flexible in the kinds of things your character might do, but you suffer in social combat because you're easy to convince.

And no, I have no idea what "being swayed towards an argument" actually means, mechanically. That's the social combat system, and I'm not prepared at this time to go into detail about that part of the system yet. Perhaps in another thread, when the ethos issue is resolved.

QuoteAnd so what if that makes it harder to change using the random method? Shouldn't it be harder? The longer something remains a habit, the harder it is to kick. ... I don't forsee option 2 as being desireably often enough to warrant its inclusion.

Our take on how these options work, in terms of what they mean and what is going on in the character's head, is thus...

(1) You are operating within previously-defined parameters; the situation at hand is one your character has thought about or experienced in the past, and knows how s/he feels about it, and so acts pretty much automatically. You aren't expanding your ideological boundaries; you're not learning anything new about yourself; you're just doing what you've done before.

(2) You are actively thinking about the issue at hand. You are weighing options, considering pros and cons. This can lead you to doing something that would normally seem not in accordance with your beliefs, but this is the result of thinking about things. This is what the points towards increasing the ratings represent - the idea that you are thinking about these ideological problems leads you to new conclusions and expands your beliefs.

QuoteIf your morality mechanics are completely divorced from your resolution mechanics, then using the raise and lower method is still a good idea because it keeps numbers manageable, which reduces handle time and the number of dice that have to be rolled. These are all good things.

And that's a pretty solid goal. I just don't think that it'll be that big of a problem, because of the back-and-forth of it. If it gets to the point where one virtue is at 1d2+1d2 and the other is at 2d12+1d4, there's really no reason to roll, because you know which one wins just by looking at the max of the former and the min of the latter.

QuoteAnd as for the system itself, I love how its shaping up. It sounds likle a really interesting system, and it doesn't matter that it originated from MtG. I would be interested in getting a list of the moralities you use, since my own game deals with morality heavily, though in a different way than yours.

We're still hammering them out, but at the moment, they are...

(W) Morality vs. Amorality (B)
(W) Harmony vs. Animosity (B)
(W) Selflessness vs. Selfishness (B)
(W) Trust vs. Paranoia (B)
(W) Order vs. Chaos (R)
(W) Conformity vs. Liberty (R)
(W) Certainty vs. Creativity (R)
(W) Responsibility vs. Freedom (R)
(U) Curiosity vs. Ignorance (R)
(U) Caution vs. Impulse (R)
(U) Detachment vs. Emotion (R)
(U) Forethought vs. Spontaneity (R)
(U) Reason vs. Instinct (G)
(U) Progress vs. Tradition (G)
(U) Education vs. Nature (G)
(U) Manipulation vs. Straight-forward / Direct (G)
(B) Parasitism vs. Interdependence (G)
(B) Worldliness vs. Innocence (G)
(B) Individualism vs. Community (G)
(B) Indifference vs. Empathy (G)

Colors being: (W)hite, (B)lack, Bl(u)e, (G)reen, and (R)ed.

Hmm, I don't check the forum for a few days and this thread springs up.

Gnome, what you're working on sounds remarkably similar to what I'm doing, with differences of course.  Maybe if we compare notes we can see if we can solve some of the same issues we're having.  My RPG, unlike yours, however, is more focused on resolving tough moral decisions than simply acting out a character.  Under my system I imagine the GM presenting some sort of situation to the players ("Your sister has been kidnapped..." "You discover that the king is going to raze this village and kill all the inhabitants..." "One of you owes money to a powerful thieves' guild and has started getting threatening messages...") and the players have to find some way to resolve the situation.  So far I've only worked on the combat system, but I also plan on working on magic, crafting, and social systems that players can use to accomplish their goals.  Also, I have a set of (currently) 145 skills that provide a wealth of options when it comes to finding a solution to a situation (these skills are used within the other systems, e.g. combat, etc.).

The other thing I've worked heavily on is a morality system.  In my system, I have twelve moral gauges that range from -10 or 10, with -10 being a deficiency, 0 being a moderation, and 10 being an excess, so most characters want to ideally be around 0.  For example, one of my gauges is Peace-Justice-Violence, which is a measure of how much force the character uses to resolve conflicts.  Now, 0 isn't "perfect," it's merely "balanced," for example if a character was a pacifist then they would range much closer to Peace.  On the other hand, a warrior might tend more toward Violence since he is constantly forced to resolve conflicts through force.  The warrior just wouldn't have the patience to debate with a villain and convince him to not be an evil dastard.  I fully expect each player to diversify their character, which will add a certain level of internal tension and conflict within the group and make things more interesting.

Originally I thought it would be good enough to simply have the moral gauges as points of reference, and for some people it might be.  But, based on Luke's advice, I decided a modest mechanical incentive can't hurt, as long as it is managed correctly.  At character creation the player can set their moralities to whatever they want, so even at this point I'm assuming that the player will design a character that they can roleplay.  However, I realize that the player and character both might change their minds on certain issues, so I have a system that let's a character's moralities change if they act contrary to them in order to reflect their new moral standing.  More than that, I have mechanical incentives to follow your moral code closely, as well as mechanical incentives to forsake your morals.

Now to the point: you aren't sure when your morality system should kick in, and neither am I.  Here are my thoughts, though.  The players encounter a situation, whether it is presented to them by the GM or whether they encounter it as a result of their actions.  The players then have to make a decision, and the decision is more along the lines of "Do I kill him or do I reason with him?" rather than "Do I hit him with my axe or my sword?"  The decision depends in part on what their characters want to do, based on their moralities, and in part on what they can do, based on their skills and abilities.  Right now I'm thinking that after the situation is resolved that the characters' actions will be checked against their moralities to see if they were following their moral code or not.  Only situation involving conflicting interests within the player should prompt this moral check.  Mundane actions like repairing armor after battle shouldn't be checked, only ones where, through the character's action or inaction, some event is in danger of occurring that violates that character's moral code.  If the pacifist beats up a bum for no reason (morally undesirable event through action), then he should get a morality check, on the other hand there's no reason for a warrior to beat up the same bum (no morally undesirable event from inaction), so no check is required if he doesn't beat up the bum.  However, if a captured bandit knows where his pals took the warrior's kidnapped sister (morally undesirable event through inaction), then the warrior would be encouraged to beat the everloving snot out of the bandit until he talks, and by the same token the pacifist would want to try to convince the bandit to talk through less forceful means.  I don't know if you could get your system to work in a similar way or not (I'm guessing not entirely), but those are my thoughts.

Now, my system assumes that the players will try and portray a character of some sort, and the character they originally created will adapt to become the character they are portraying.  The players are free to act as they please, but doing so could set them at odds with the other players (who are actually following their moral guidelines).  I'm not designing this system with Gamists in mind, nor do I expect to force Gamists to submit to my system.  I think I'm aiming more for a Narrativist audience, with a dose of Simulationists.  At the end of the day, my moral gauges are nothing more than a reference point, and a lot of ambiguity will be necessary in enforcing them ("Was this a Violent action or not?"  it may not be clear in many situations which moralities apply).  My main hope from the morality system is to get players, GM included, to think about the moral aspect of the game and their actions within the game, the mechanics simply provide a little extra incentive, as well as making sure that the morality system isn't completely ignored.  So I think your target audience is a huge consideration, and you shouldn't be designing your game for people that won't play it.  This way you can make something that will work for the players interested in playing it, instead of making something that works for everybody and divorces the player from the game entirely.  There will always be people with no interest in playing your game, and you'll not only waste your efforts trying to include them in your audience, but you will also damage the game for those who would have actually enjoyed it.  If people just want to sit around and tell stories, they don't need rules and dice, and won't want to use rules and dice to tell a story.  If they want to test their mastery of a complex system, then rules are necessary, while narration is not.  If you want to include everyone, then you need to design your entire system with that goal in mind, which places a lot of limitations on what you can and can't do.

In case you're interested, here's a list of my twelve gauges.  They might serve as inspiration.

Peace-Justice-Violence Death-Humanity-Life Vengeance-Mercy-Naivety Fear-Courage-Recklessness Blasphemy-Piety-Fanaticism Selfishness-Duty-Myrmidon Deception-Honor-Arrogance Manipulation-Honesty-Legalism Passion-Discipline-Coldness Malice-Charity-Pity Poverty-Contentment-Greed Abnegation-Chastity-Indulgence

amount of force used to solve problems one's value and view of life how evil is dealt with how one regards personal safety how one feels toward religion loyalty and obedience of authority one's code of conduct the importance placed on words one's measure of self control and emotion how one deals with the less fortunate one's value of the material one's value of worldly pleasures

Anyway, I hope this gives you a few ideas.  Keep in mind that my system hasn't yet been playtested, though I expect to start any time.

Quote from: Egonblaidd on April 08, 2009, 06:21:43 PMGnome, what you're working on sounds remarkably similar to what I'm doing, with differences of course.

Huzzah for simultaneous design, I guess.

QuoteMaybe if we compare notes we can see if we can solve some of the same issues we're having.  My RPG, unlike yours, however, is more focused on resolving tough moral decisions than simply acting out a character.

That is a thing that could be done.

Also, don't confuse this subsystem for the core of what's going on. It's part of the whole, but not the most important part.

QuoteSo far I've only worked on the combat system, but I also plan on working on magic, crafting, and social systems that players can use to accomplish their goals.  Also, I have a set of (currently) 145 skills that provide a wealth of options when it comes to finding a solution to a situation (these skills are used within the other systems, e.g. combat, etc.).

Heh, skills are another thing that we've been completely unable to figure out. We're having massive scope and grouping issues; three times now, we've spent about three nights at our local diner discussing this topic for about six hours each sitting, and we've still got next to nothing done.

QuoteIn my system, I have twelve moral gauges that range from -10 or 10, with -10 being a deficiency, 0 being a moderation, and 10 being an excess, so most characters want to ideally be around 0.  For example, one of my gauges is Peace-Justice-Violence, which is a measure of how much force the character uses to resolve conflicts.

Your take on this whole thing seems rather different than mine. That sounds similar, but we don't really have a place that we consider "ideal." The character's beliefs are the character's beliefs.

QuoteMore than that, I have mechanical incentives to follow your moral code closely, as well as mechanical incentives to forsake your morals.

Some of the advice here has started me thinking along these lines, and it does seem like a solid idea.

QuoteRight now I'm thinking that after the situation is resolved that the characters' actions will be checked against their moralities to see if they were following their moral code or not.  Only situation involving conflicting interests within the player should prompt this moral check.  Mundane actions like repairing armor after battle shouldn't be checked, only ones where, through the character's action or inaction, some event is in danger of occurring that violates that character's moral code. ... I don't know if you could get your system to work in a similar way or not (I'm guessing not entirely), but those are my thoughts.

Hmm... that would seem, to me, to encourage a more action-based morality than intention-based. If you only check morality after an "event" is finished that is ethically-relevant, then so long as the end result followed the character's beliefs, they're good to go.

I'm not sure if I like that idea. I like the idea of the virtues as motivators and more intent-based. Action-based ethical modifications should have some place in the system, but I don't know if I want it to be the only thing, or even the primary one.

QuoteSo I think your target audience is a huge consideration, and you shouldn't be designing your game for people that won't play it.  This way you can make something that will work for the players interested in playing it, instead of making something that works for everybody and divorces the player from the game entirely.  There will always be people with no interest in playing your game, and you'll not only waste your efforts trying to include them in your audience, but you will also damage the game for those who would have actually enjoyed it.  If people just want to sit around and tell stories, they don't need rules and dice, and won't want to use rules and dice to tell a story.  If they want to test their mastery of a complex system, then rules are necessary, while narration is not.  If you want to include everyone, then you need to design your entire system with that goal in mind, which places a lot of limitations on what you can and can't do.

How do you know who is going to have an interest in your game?

I am not interested in going out of my way to close off the game from those who don't necessarily share my views on what makes the game good or interesting. There are assumptions made in the system that make it simulationist; hell, most of the assumptions made are simulationist in nature. That doesn't mean we want to go out of our way to preclude gamists or narrativists or new players who have no idea what those terms mean.

The gamer market is already small. Do you really want to go out of your way to tell large segments of the gamer population that your game isn't for you? How are you supposed to reasonabily succeed, as a business model, with that kind of approach in mind?

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 08, 2009, 04:50:51 AM
But then you punish the player for trying to represent a sudden and drastic change in the character's beliefs, which is something we want to avoid doing too much of.

Why do you want to avoid this?

From one point of view, one of the great literary devices is the concept of losing one's faith to pursue a new agenda.

From the other point of view, you indicated earlier in the thread that you wanted players to act according to the inherent morality/virtue combination established for the character. Allowing a player to break their character's outlook on the world without some kind of punishment is just asking for players who go "all-out-chaotic-evil" one scene because it suits their agenda, then "all-out-lawful-good" the next scene because it fits better with the new circumstances, then choosing another virtue path in the next scene because things are different again.

Without a system of reward/punishment, I don't see the value of the numbers at all.

Especially since you've already stated...

QuoteCan the GM say, "No, your character would never do that?"

No.

QuoteCan the group take a vote on whether my action is "on the curve?"

How... would that even be a reasonable thing to happen? No.
[/quote]

Which makes the following statement curious...

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 08, 2009, 12:36:18 AM
You can act wildly against character. Basically the GM looking at the sheet would simply be to ensure that the player is modifying the character's virtue and ethos values appropriately.

Why is the GM bothering to modify the values on the character sheet when they have no mechanical effect on play?

Which in turn begs the question...

Why bother going to this much effort designing a morality system that can be completely ignored by the players?

Just questions...

V

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 08, 2009, 01:43:18 PM
The ethos subsystem is just that - a subsystem, almost entirely separate from the rest of the system. Your ethos has no impact on how well you swing a sword, sling a spell, or shape a spear (bonus points for alliteration?).

It *may* be tied to the social combat system, but as I mentioned earlier, I really only have an inkling of how that will work. I like the idea, though, and it would seem to resolve some of the issues we had in the social combat system.

I sort of think this is a bad idea.  The rules for this are so gigantic and intense that if it doesn't tie into the rest of the game it's going to be more of a bother than a boon.  Aside from that, I think it's unrealistic.  The mindset and motivation you have in taking part in a difficult action has a pretty real effect on how skillfully you handle it.  This is too hard to interpret into dice for most systems, but if you already have the framework set up you might as well use it.  It shouldn't give a huge bonus or anything, maybe a +1 to +3 bonus to your roll or something similar, depending on how high the virtue is.  If you want to avoid min-maxing you should just add something to the rules that discourages it.  Maybe whenever you act against a virtue that's over a certain score your stress bar builds or something.  I don't know your system well enough to really recommend specifics, but there's always a way.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 08, 2009, 08:39:37 PM

Quote from: Egonblaidd on April 08, 2009, 06:21:43 PMMaybe if we compare notes we can see if we can solve some of the same issues we're having.  My RPG, unlike yours, however, is more focused on resolving tough moral decisions than simply acting out a character.

That is a thing that could be done.

Also, don't confuse this subsystem for the core of what's going on. It's part of the whole, but not the most important part.

I think I understand where you're coming from here; morality is simply one aspect of the world to be explored in your system, while morality is a core issue in my system.

Quote

QuoteSo far I've only worked on the combat system, but I also plan on working on magic, crafting, and social systems that players can use to accomplish their goals.  Also, I have a set of (currently) 145 skills that provide a wealth of options when it comes to finding a solution to a situation (these skills are used within the other systems, e.g. combat, etc.).

Heh, skills are another thing that we've been completely unable to figure out. We're having massive scope and grouping issues; three times now, we've spent about three nights at our local diner discussing this topic for about six hours each sitting, and we've still got next to nothing done.

I hear you there.  I've spent a good deal of time thinking about what skills need to be included and how to group them.  I have skills coming in related groups, typically of three or four but some with as few as two or as many as eight, and as one skill is used the entire group of skills advances slowly.  Needless to say, grouping the skills was a pain, and I'm still not sure about how I've done it.  Some skills I feel should belong in two groups, like Sculpturing should be in both the Stone Working and Visual Art groups.  Anyway, I'd be happy to share my skill list with you if you'd like to look over it for inspiration.  One of my goals with the skill system was to represent every kind of action, from scholarly studies to crafting to combat, so you might find it helpful.

Quote

QuoteIn my system, I have twelve moral gauges that range from -10 or 10, with -10 being a deficiency, 0 being a moderation, and 10 being an excess, so most characters want to ideally be around 0.  For example, one of my gauges is Peace-Justice-Violence, which is a measure of how much force the character uses to resolve conflicts.

Your take on this whole thing seems rather different than mine. That sounds similar, but we don't really have a place that we consider "ideal." The character's beliefs are the character's beliefs.

That's fine, there are many ways to do it, and I considered a system similar to the one you're using.  Both our systems have the advantage of being rather gray, since there is no "right" morality, only what the players choose, though I think your system might do a better job of this by having directly opposed virtues.  If "right" morals exist (based probably on religion), then they won't be straight zeros, in fact I think I'll leave it up to each GM to assign a "right" moral code to religion based on their interpretation of my descriptions of that religion, so it will differ between gaming groups, making it impossible for players to simply memorize it.

Quote

QuoteMore than that, I have mechanical incentives to follow your moral code closely, as well as mechanical incentives to forsake your morals.

Some of the advice here has started me thinking along these lines, and it does seem like a solid idea.

One thing we should both probably be careful of is to match the reward to the character.  The rewards for acting in accord with your morals should suit a character that follows those morals, while the rewards for acting contrary to your morals should be some alternate sort that suits a corrupt character better, or at least suits a character following the morals that the character is acting out.  In a simplified example, if you always give swords for being good and spells for being evil, don't expect to see evil swordsmen or good mages, which if this is your intention is perfectly fine, otherwise your mechanics will support unwanted stereotypes (like good swordsmen and evil mages).

Quote

QuoteRight now I'm thinking that after the situation is resolved that the characters' actions will be checked against their moralities to see if they were following their moral code or not.  Only situation involving conflicting interests within the player should prompt this moral check.  Mundane actions like repairing armor after battle shouldn't be checked, only ones where, through the character's action or inaction, some event is in danger of occurring that violates that character's moral code. ... I don't know if you could get your system to work in a similar way or not (I'm guessing not entirely), but those are my thoughts.

Hmm... that would seem, to me, to encourage a more action-based morality than intention-based. If you only check morality after an "event" is finished that is ethically-relevant, then so long as the end result followed the character's beliefs, they're good to go.

I'm not sure if I like that idea. I like the idea of the virtues as motivators and more intent-based. Action-based ethical modifications should have some place in the system, but I don't know if I want it to be the only thing, or even the primary one.

Actually the reason why I thought moral judgment should take place afterwards is (a) the characters start seeing the consequences of their actions, and therefore can be a better judge of whether or not they were justified, and (b) I don't want players focusing on how certain decisions will affect their morality, I'd rather have them focused on whether or not a certain decision makes sense given the situation, their moral inclination, and their ability to carry out that decision.  How actions are judged morally is something else entirely, and will depend largely on the particular gaming group.  I would prefer intention-based judgment, but that's impossible to do mechanically, and it's almost as hard for the GM to guess a player's intentions, and not even the player may consciously know why they adopted a particular course of action.  At the moment I'm thinking of allowing the players to judge themselves, or at least discuss it with the GM.  I'm actually inclined to place the final word on the player rather than the GM, though perhaps the GM could intervene if the player is abusing that power.

I did read a thread where the game was specially designed to judge morality based solely on actions, so you could do "good" things for purely selfish reasons, which kind of created it's own version of "gray" since "good" and "evil" are no longer ethical issues.  An interesting idea, but not what either of us is going for, I think.

Quote

QuoteSo I think your target audience is a huge consideration, and you shouldn't be designing your game for people that won't play it.  This way you can make something that will work for the players interested in playing it, instead of making something that works for everybody and divorces the player from the game entirely.  There will always be people with no interest in playing your game, and you'll not only waste your efforts trying to include them in your audience, but you will also damage the game for those who would have actually enjoyed it.  If people just want to sit around and tell stories, they don't need rules and dice, and won't want to use rules and dice to tell a story.  If they want to test their mastery of a complex system, then rules are necessary, while narration is not.  If you want to include everyone, then you need to design your entire system with that goal in mind, which places a lot of limitations on what you can and can't do.

How do you know who is going to have an interest in your game?

I am not interested in going out of my way to close off the game from those who don't necessarily share my views on what makes the game good or interesting. There are assumptions made in the system that make it simulationist; hell, most of the assumptions made are simulationist in nature. That doesn't mean we want to go out of our way to preclude gamists or narrativists or new players who have no idea what those terms mean.

The gamer market is already small. Do you really want to go out of your way to tell large segments of the gamer population that your game isn't for you? How are you supposed to reasonabily succeed, as a business model, with that kind of approach in mind?

You don't have to exclude people, just don't stretch your system to specially include certain kinds of gamers.  Trying to make a puzzle game that appeals to first person shooter players is a design goal all by itself, you can't very easily make any and every puzzle game appeal to FPS players without breaking the game (unless you're "thinking with portals," heh).  The point is, think about who is mostly likely to want to play your game, and then expand your system to include as many other people as you can without alienating your original audience.  Don't sign up to be the Republican candidate and then go all liberal.  You can still make your game appeal to a broad group of people without making it appeal to everyone.  If your game only appeals to a small niche then that's fine too if that's what you want, otherwise you're not doing something right if you want to appeal to a large audience and only appeal to a small group, and it may be that you're trying to overextend your system.

In your case there very well could be Narrativists and Gamists who enjoy playing your game, just like there are many people who enjoy playing Smash Bros. even if they play more Zelda or Mario, which are different genres from Smash Bros.  And there are things you can do to reach out to Narrativists and Gamists to include them, but since your game is more heavily Simulationist it would be better not to do something that would exclude the Simulationists.  Regardless, however your game is designed, there will be an audience it appeals to, the hard part is understanding who that audience is and marketing it accordingly.  Your game won't catch on if you tell people it's a dungeon crawler, because most the people that would enjoy your game wouldn't enjoy dungeon crawling and so won't even look at your game, and most dungeon crawlers won't enjoy your game because it's not really about dungeon crawling.

It's good that you want to target a large audience, but you need to understand who that audience is and what they want in a game, in part so you can design the game to appeal to them and in part so that you can market it to the right people.  A good place to start is with yourself.  Ask yourself why you would want to play your game, and what aspects of the game you enjoy.  Ask your playtesters these same questions.  Once you get enough answers you'll have a much better idea of who the audience is and why they will want to play your game.

Quote from: VulpinoidWhy do you want to avoid this? ... Without a system of reward/punishment, I don't see the value of the numbers at all.

Part of the problem is my co-developers. Both of them have told me that they would walk away from a game that enforced character actions on the player.

This irks me, but I can also understand it. Like I've said earlier in the thread, if the character always responds mechanistically, regardless of the player, then there's little point for the player to sit at the table, right? They might as well go watch a movie for all the input they're getting to have.

QuoteFrom the other point of view, you indicated earlier in the thread that you wanted players to act according to the inherent morality/virtue combination established for the character. Allowing a player to break their character's outlook on the world without some kind of punishment is just asking for players who go "all-out-chaotic-evil" one scene because it suits their agenda, then "all-out-lawful-good" the next scene because it fits better with the new circumstances, then choosing another virtue path in the next scene because things are different again.

Huh... I had not really thought about it that way. That's a good point.

I'm still torn, though. Can you reconcile the issue of "player having little to no input regarding character action" with "the player shouldn't be allowed to take actions willy-nilly without taking the character's beliefs into account"?

Quote from: otspiiiI sort of think this is a bad idea.  The rules for this are so gigantic and intense that if it doesn't tie into the rest of the game it's going to be more of a bother than a boon.

I'm sorry, but this made me chuckle.

If you think that this rather simple subsystem for ethos is complicated and "gigantic," then I don't think you could express the mechanical size of the rest of the subsystems with mere words.

Seriously, this is tip-of-the-iceberg kind of stuff.

Also, not tying into other subsystems is part of the overall design. We're trying to make all of these things very modular and scalable within themselves. Combat can go from nothing (as in, you have *no* combat mechanics) to ridiculously-detailed. This is nigh-impossible to do if there is crosstalk across the subsystems; a certain level of detail would be required for the interfaces to at all be accurate, unless they, too, scaled, which is even more complexity.

QuoteThe mindset and motivation you have in taking part in a difficult action has a pretty real effect on how skillfully you handle it.  This is too hard to interpret into dice for most systems, but if you already have the framework set up you might as well use it.  It shouldn't give a huge bonus or anything, maybe a +1 to +3 bonus to your roll or something similar, depending on how high the virtue is.

I can believe that there would be instances where the strength of your faith in your beliefs and ethos would generate some small benefits, but in general? Not really seeing it.

As an aside, in our system, bonuses - in terms of "+1 or +3," like you mention here - don't generally exist. I find them to be more complex than necessary, and they also seriously skew the normative curves that we've based the system around. Items can sometimes grant small bonuses, but that's currently the only source of such bonii, and I'm not sure if I want to get into them existing elsewhere.

Though treating ethos and virtues as "equipment" for social encounters, insofar as how they interact with the social encounter mechanics, might be a way to go about things... hmm

Quote from: EgonblaiddI think I understand where you're coming from here; morality is simply one aspect of the world to be explored in your system, while morality is a core issue in my system.

Yep, that hits the difference square on the head, I think.

QuoteI hear you there.  I've spent a good deal of time thinking about what skills need to be included and how to group them.  I have skills coming in related groups, typically of three or four but some with as few as two or as many as eight, and as one skill is used the entire group of skills advances slowly.  Needless to say, grouping the skills was a pain, and I'm still not sure about how I've done it.  Some skills I feel should belong in two groups, like Sculpturing should be in both the Stone Working and Visual Art groups.  Anyway, I'd be happy to share my skill list with you if you'd like to look over it for inspiration.  One of my goals with the skill system was to represent every kind of action, from scholarly studies to crafting to combat, so you might find it helpful.

Hells yeah I'd find that helpful! Sounds like even though we have different "core ideas," it sounds like we're approaching our separate ideas in rather similar manners. I'd definitely appreciate having a look-see at what you've got, because we're stumped and seem completely unable to get anywhere...

QuoteThat's fine, there are many ways to do it, and I considered a system similar to the one you're using.  Both our systems have the advantage of being rather gray, since there is no "right" morality, only what the players choose, though I think your system might do a better job of this by having directly opposed virtues.  If "right" morals exist (based probably on religion), then they won't be straight zeros, in fact I think I'll leave it up to each GM to assign a "right" moral code to religion based on their interpretation of my descriptions of that religion, so it will differ between gaming groups, making it impossible for players to simply memorize it.

However, your approach has the advantage of three things in a group, rather than being polar. I imagine that that difference has some kind of ramification on how the system is used/interpreted, though I'm not really able to say what it would be.

QuoteActually the reason why I thought moral judgment should take place afterwards is (a) the characters start seeing the consequences of their actions, and therefore can be a better judge of whether or not they were justified, and (b) I don't want players focusing on how certain decisions will affect their morality, I'd rather have them focused on whether or not a certain decision makes sense given the situation, their moral inclination, and their ability to carry out that decision.

Your reasons here for doing it based on action rather than intent are pretty sound.

I still prefer to have the roll prior to the action. In my mind, the virtues set the parameters of what the character is willing to do, how they generally react to events around them; a character with high Selfishness isn't going to run into a burning building to save orphans (well, okay, he might if he's rather conflicted on this virtue set, but you get my point), unless the player makes an active choice to change the character's beliefs (by acting against the higher virtue in the pair). In your model, the character could act either way, with the action reinforcing the beliefs...

I don't know, I guess they're both valid ways to go about it. I like mine because of what I envision the virtues representing.

QuoteI did read a thread where the game was specially designed to judge morality based solely on actions, so you could do "good" things for purely selfish reasons, which kind of created it's own version of "gray" since "good" and "evil" are no longer ethical issues.  An interesting idea, but not what either of us is going for, I think.

Yeah, not really interested in that sort of thing.

QuoteThe point is, think about who is mostly likely to want to play your game, and then expand your system to include as many other people as you can without alienating your original audience.  Don't sign up to be the Republican candidate and then go all liberal.  You can still make your game appeal to a broad group of people without making it appeal to everyone.  If your game only appeals to a small niche then that's fine too if that's what you want, otherwise you're not doing something right if you want to appeal to a large audience and only appeal to a small group, and it may be that you're trying to overextend your system.

I'm fairly certain that we'll hit our primary market - simulationists - square on the head with this one.

The main secondary market I want to be able to hit is new players. I want a group of sixteen-year-olds who have never played or read a tabletop RPG in their lives before to pick up this game and be able to figure the game out, as well as how to roleplay.

Tertiary markets are everybody else. I think we'll be able to grab gamists rather easily, because it's got a lot of crunchy bits in the combat and social encounter subsystems, with lots of fiddly bits that can be messed with and all kinds of opportunities to tweak characters and maximize ability to overcome challenges of all kinds. Narrativists... I still don't understand this segment of the gaming population, and probably never will. I'll admit that my concern about whether or not they'll play the game comes behind my concern for gamists, which is rather low because I don't like gamist philosophy.

QuoteAnd there are things you can do to reach out to Narrativists and Gamists to include them, but since your game is more heavily Simulationist it would be better not to do something that would exclude the Simulationists.

In the end, if there are two choices for how to design something, and one is clearly more simulationist than the other, we go with the simulationist design.

We have no intent of abandoning our original reasons for writing this system - malcontent with d20, particularly in terms of economics and general character growth - in the course of designing it.

QuoteIt's good that you want to target a large audience, but you need to understand who that audience is and what they want in a game, in part so you can design the game to appeal to them and in part so that you can market it to the right people.  A good place to start is with yourself.  Ask yourself why you would want to play your game, and what aspects of the game you enjoy.  Ask your playtesters these same questions.  Once you get enough answers you'll have a much better idea of who the audience is and why they will want to play your game.

I am not a player at heart; I'm a GM. Sitting on the player-side of the screen is becoming more and more strange to me.

I want to *run* this game because it makes sense. All of the pieces, while modularized into their own little space, fit neatly with each other like cogs in a machine; combine that with the systemic approach to dealing with realistic economies, politics, ecologies, terrains, and histories, and you have a game and setting that are internally consistent both to themselves and to each other (that is, the game doesn't disrupt the setting, and the setting doesn't disrupt the game).

I suppose a simpler way of putting it might be this: whenever a player asks "why," the system can provide a reason, regardless of what that "why" is about.

QuoteI'm still torn, though. Can you reconcile the issue of "player having little to no input regarding character action" with "the player shouldn't be allowed to take actions willy-nilly without taking the character's beliefs into account"?

I see nothing wrong with post-facto judgement.  The proposition that a player might switch violently from LG to CE is overstated; it might happen, but its blatantly bad play which is ignoring the spririt of the game and the rules.  There is no rule based way to constrain a player who chooses to ignore the rules.  And a variety of other effects, beyond simply modifications of the ethos system, can be applied after the fact to drive home the significance of inappropriate actions - if, for example, you know you are supposed to die with your lord, and choose not to, you could be handed a "Coward" trait (if your system allows for that sort of thing).

"Punishment" is too loaded a term.  You can represent the consequences of actions without resorting to explicitly coercive punishment.

To add to what contracycle is saying, and to one of the things I said in my last post, I think most people will be roleplaying some type of character.  What I'll probably do, and what might be a good idea for your system as well, is encourage new players of your system to play a character that strongly resembles themselves.  If they give a care about fictional ethical issues, then they should play a character that cares about ethics, if not they should go more for an amoral character.  If they care about min/maxing then they should play some kind of brainiac that's constantly contrasting even the most minute differences between different objects, courses of action, etc. in order to find the most efficient one.  Basically, they should start off with a character that they will roleplay naturally.  The Gamist probably shouldn't start with a paladin, since what is important to a paladin is not important to a Gamist, and vice versa.  Once they get a hang of the system then they can branch out to other personalities.  The paladin could try playing a psychopath, for example.

Someone mentioned, either here or in another thread, that everybody likes to play dark jedi in Star Wars games.  I'll admit, shooting lightning and throwing people off ledges is a blast, and I also enjoy a good dose of GTA and such, but in a game like Knights of the Old Republic I tend to prefer being "good," just because I'd rather be the hero than the villain, the good guy rather than the bad guy, and also probably because it tickles my conscience more than something like GTA.  I may take insane pleasure from torturing my worshipers in Black and White, or vent my frustration in Halo by slaughtering my comrades and killing myself, repeatedly (ah, autosaves), but like in GTA and many other games, they are nameless, generic, impersonal people.  When in a game like KOTOR a woman begs be to find her kidnapped daughter, my first inclination is not to blast her with lightning, but rather to sympathize with her situation and help her.  Here I am interacting with people that have their own, albeit sometimes clichéd or generic, personalities, their own background, even if it is only rather briefly covered, etc.  It feels more like I'm interacting with real people and hence my conscience pushes me a lot more in these kinds of cases to behave as if I really was a jedi and someone was asking for my help.

My point is, while everyone may jokingly consider plundering the caravan that they are supposed to be protecting, not everyone will actually do it.  There is, I think, a misconception about roleplayers that they are all Gamist and will bend the rules to maximize their abilities.  Certainly there are a lot of people like this, as can be seen in the videogame industry and their desire to "balance" the game, but there are many other people that play games for different reasons (depending on the game, of course).  I came to the conclusion that non-Gamist oriented RPGs don't need to be balanced, per se, because if someone wants to play an elf it will be because they want to play an elf, not because the elf has better stats than the human.  There will be people who play the elf because it is more powerful, and you can't do anything about that except "balance" the elf and human.  But if in your setting the elf is more powerful than the human, then non-Gamists won't be too pleased if the elf and human are balanced.  Of course, you do need some degree of balance.  If it's nigh impossible to play as a thief, then nobody will play thieves, so even if thieves don't fare as well in combat as a warrior the thief still needs to be playable.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's better to trust the player than to try and force the player.  Yes, some people will abuse your system in order to min/max, it can't be helped.  But those aren't the people you're trying to appeal to anyway.  There will always be people who Huskarl-rush in Age of Empires II (curse the Goths and their hyper-infantry production and their arrow-resistant Huskarls!), but that type of play won't appeal to everyone.  As long as you make clear how the players are supposed to conduct themselves there will be some who do so.  Adding a mechanical incentive is a sure way to make sure that people are aware of what your intentions are.  Do you care about the Gamists smirking over your game and how easy it is once you figure out how to min/max?  They aren't your audience, your audience is the people that will want to try different things, different approaches, different characters, in order to experience your world.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject.

You said you were interested in seeing my skill list, well here it is.  I've organized it (alphabetically) into a table and decreased the font size so the post length isn't into next week.  Skill groups (or "Basic Skills" as I term them in my system) are non-indented with their subskills ("Advanced Skills" in my system) underneath the skill group and indented.  The idea is that only the subskills are actually used, but the skill level of the group is added to the subskill level for tests.  Using subskills advances both the subskill and the skill group, thus making all skills in the group more effective, but mostly that particular subskill.
Obviously some of these are setting-specific, like languages or theology, but you can get the general idea without knowing anything about the setting.  For Literacy I opted to do orthographies rather than languages, so for example you only need a skill in Western Script to read or write in Westerspeak, Peridan, Nostr, Slevic, or Achaean, but you have to also know that language in order to understand what you're reading or write something comprehensible.
One issue I'm thinking about is a skill for taking care of equipment, i.e. polishing nicks off swords, oiling swords and armor, etc.  Should I add a skill for that, and if so, where?  Does an existing skill cover that?  Do I even need a skill for that?  Also, I'm thinking maybe I should move Lockpicking to Engineering.  My Law and History subskills are rather generic, too, but they might be fine as is.  As things go on I'll probably think up more issues like this, but my skillset is fairly well filled out right now, I think.  Although I'd take any advice you have on how to improve it.  If you want to comment on how I can improve my skill system, I already have a thread for it here (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=27761.0).

Anyway, here it is.  There are currently 34 skill groups and 145 subskills.

Acrobatics    Aerial Motion    Balance    Climbing    Dodge Agriculture    Botany    Cultivation Athletics    Conditioning    Running    Swimming Business    Evaluate    Haggle    Management Ceramics    Brick Making    Porcelain    Pottery Combat    Chain Weapons    Fencing    Hand to Hand    Heavy Weapons    Improvised Weaponry    Polearms    Shields    Short Blades    Swords Engineering    Architecture    Electricity    Machines    Shipbuilding

Glass Working    Glassblowing    Glass Color History    Archeology    Eastern History    Middle Eastern History    Western History Husbandry    Animal Handling    Breeding    Riding Law    Eastern Law    Hadari Law    Western Law Leadership    Public Speaking    Rally Linguistics    Achaean    Hadari    Malahir    Nostr    Peridan    Semptyrian    Sian    Slevic    Westerspeak    Wildlander Tribal Literacy    Hadari Script    Malahir Script    Semptyrian Ideography    Sian Logography    Western Script

Literary Art    Drama    Poetry    Prose Leatherworking    Leather Crafting    Skinning    Tanning Medicine    Disease    First Aid    Surgery Metallurgy    Gem Cutting    Mining    Prospecting    Refining Missiles    Blowguns    Bows    Crossbows    Darts    Gunpowder    Siege    Sling    Throwing Music    Brass    Composing    Flute    Harp    Keyboard    Lute    Pipes    Violin    Voice

Natural Philosophy    Alchemy    Astronomy    Biology    Geometry    Gnosticism    Mathematics    Mechanics    Nature Perception    Awareness    Intuition    Search Persuasion    Bluff    Charm    Disguise    Intimidate Sailing    Ship Handling    Navigation    Marine Weather Sleight of Hand    Cheat/Trick    Steal Smithing    Armor Smithing    Blacksmithing    Silver Smithing    Weapon Smithing Spiritual Arts    Arcane Art    Astral Art    Black Art    Holy Art    Inner Art

Stealth    Hide    Lockpicking    Sneak Stone Working    Masonry    Quarrying    Sculpturing Survival    Camp Sites    Fishing    Orientation    Tracking Textiles    Braiding    Knitting    Ropework    Weaving Theology    Achaean Pantheon    Astrology    Nostr Pantheon    Pantheism    Semptyrian Pantheon    The Way    The Word    Wildlander Tribal Religions Visual Art    Drawing    Painting    Printmaking Woodworking    Bow Making    Carpentry    Carving    Logging

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 09, 2009, 05:58:37 AMI'm fairly certain that we'll hit our primary market - simulationists - square on the head with this one.

Alright, I feel I should try and correct this now before it creates lasting confusion: what KIND of "Simulationists" though? You realize there's more than one type, right? That many Sims won't like a crunchy, character-centric game? Because some Sims are in it for the exploration of some other element of the game, like setting, and the characters are treated/considered as nothing but their eyeballs? That neither "realism" or "complex mechanics" define "Simulationism"?

QuoteI think we'll be able to grab gamists rather easily, because it's got a lot of crunchy bits in the combat and social encounter subsystems, with lots of fiddly bits that can be messed with and all kinds of opportunities to tweak characters and maximize ability to overcome challenges of all kinds.

Crunch and fiddly bits do not Gamism make. Folks are confusing techniques and mechanics with styles/goals-of-play.

Given those issues, I think this thread and your design would be better served if the GNS terminology is simply avoided, as I've noticed the ideas being expressed about what comprises what and what each group does/likes are overly simplified and often just wrong, setting up false dichotomies and categorizations.

(Tangentially: on narrativists: have you ever read a fiction book or watched an entertainment movie and enjoyed the story? Then you understand narrativism! (It honestly isn't rocket science or alien telepathy. Really!))

Quote from: EgonblaiddI think most people will be roleplaying some type of character.  What I'll probably do, and what might be a good idea for your system as well, is encourage new players of your system to play a character that strongly resembles themselves.

That seems to be a normal thing to do, when first starting out with gaming, so I would probably do this.

QuoteIf they care about min/maxing then they should play some kind of brainiac that's constantly contrasting even the most minute differences between different objects, courses of action, etc. in order to find the most efficient one.

This statement makes no sense to me. The concept of real-world "efficiency," and trying to apply it to a fictional world, seems kind of ridiculous.

QuoteHere I am interacting with people that have their own, albeit sometimes clichéd or generic, personalities, their own background, even if it is only rather briefly covered, etc.  It feels more like I'm interacting with real people and hence my conscience pushes me a lot more in these kinds of cases to behave as if I really was a jedi and someone was asking for my help.

Yes, and that is partially what the ethos system is for - to represent NPCs and make them more sensible parts of the world.

QuoteMy point is, while everyone may jokingly consider plundering the caravan that they are supposed to be protecting, not everyone will actually do it.  There is, I think, a misconception about roleplayers that they are all Gamist and will bend the rules to maximize their abilities.

They're not. But I imagine most have a gamist streak, if nothing else.

QuoteI came to the conclusion that non-Gamist oriented RPGs don't need to be balanced, per se, because if someone wants to play an elf it will be because they want to play an elf, not because the elf has better stats than the human.

That... good sir, is just ridiculous.

Present me an unbalanced game, and the temptation to take the better option will be all the stronger because there are no reasons to not take it.

If the system is reasonably balanced, you might not have to delve into mathematical minutiae if you don't care about the gamists - but there still has to be balance of some kind. Otherwise the lack of balance is staring everybody in the face, and that'll cause issues if nothing else will.

QuoteThey aren't your audience, your audience is the people that will want to try different things, different approaches, different characters, in order to experience your world.

Are they a gamer? Then I should consider them part of my audience, and try to figure out how to bring them in without disrupting the core ethos of my design.

Seriously. Going out of your way to cut yourself off from a segment of your target market strikes me as absurd and a bad way to do business. If I can get gamists into the fold with just a little bit of extra work - why the hell wouldn't I?

QuoteAnyway, here it is.  There are currently 34 skill groups and 145 subskills.

Sweet! Thanks for letting me have a look.

Quote from: greyormAlright, I feel I should try and correct this now before it creates lasting confusion: what KIND of "Simulationists" though? You realize there's more than one type, right? That many Sims won't like a crunchy, character-centric game? Because some Sims are in it for the exploration of some other element of the game, like setting, and the characters are treated/considered as nothing but their eyeballs? That neither "realism" or "complex mechanics" define "Simulationism"?

... *sigh*

What's the point in talking about people who don't care about system? If they don't care... then they don't care. They can do what they want to do with any freaking system out there, so there is no point in having that discussion. You'll grab them if you grab them, and you won't if you don't. Simple as that, and there is nothing you can do about it.

However, to appease you and perhaps try to make it clear to anyone else who hasn't been following along with what I've been saying: none of the subsystems are required to play. All the subsystems are scalable in terms of mechanics and complexity, and they can be tuned independently of each other.

So can we get off this train of thought? Because I'm getting kind of agitated, and I'd rather not lose the gems that are popping up.

QuoteCrunch and fiddly bits do not Gamism make. Folks are confusing techniques and mechanics with styles/goals-of-play.

I don't think that distinction matters, when talking about game design.

QuoteGiven those issues, I think this thread and your design would be better served if the GNS terminology is simply avoided, as I've noticed the ideas being expressed about what comprises what and what each group does/likes are overly simplified and often just wrong, setting up false dichotomies and categorizations.

Did you ever maybe think that it was a failing of the theory, then, that people constantly "misunderstand" it?

But whatever, fine. Yes, let's not bring it up again.

Quote(Tangentially: on narrativists: have you ever read a fiction book or watched an entertainment movie and enjoyed the story? Then you understand narrativism! (It honestly isn't rocket science or alien telepathy. Really!))

I find it ridiculous that you posit that simulationism and gamism are much more complex than I make them out to be, then say this kind of thing about narrativism.

QuoteHowever, to appease you and perhaps...So can we get off this train of thought? Because I'm getting kind of agitated...

Gnome, you are completely misunderstanding the reason for my post.

I am not talking about people who don't care about system or about catering or not catering to them. In fact, I am not talking about system at all, or ignoring people, or anything of the sort related to design. My example was used solely to help make a case for the misuse of the terms and categories being tossed around, and how it will hurt the conversation and attempts to develop the game. The situation you are agitated with has nothing to do with the point I was trying to make or why I made the statement about different types of Sim, and I apologize for the confusion.

QuoteI find it ridiculous that you posit that simulationism and gamism are much more complex than I make them out to be, then say this kind of thing about narrativism.

No. I am saying you might want to evaluate why you say you don't "understand" Narrativism when it isn't some weird, alien thing, and you have certainly understood it in the past as part of the human experience, though perhaps without realizing it.

Your perception of ridiculousness over the thought that I am claiming Sim and Gam are "more complex" than Nar is also important here because, no, they are also as simple: your understanding of what they are is just incorrect. Which I point out because:

QuoteDid you ever maybe think that it was a failing of the theory, then, that people constantly "misunderstand" it?

No more so than I think it is a "failing" of basic evolutionary theory that people constantly misunderstand it.

Or a failing of computer terminology that untrained users don't know what the terms "desktop" or "cursor" or "explorer" mean and often call them by completely different names, or confuse the parts and how they work with one another (such as the difference between RAM and a hard drive).

(We all forget that even basic letters and numbers required significant training to learn, understand, and use: nothing was obvious or comprehensible via casual study, especially nothing we carry pre-existing impressions of that then get in the way of our understanding (as when learning a second language unrelated to the one we know).)

And that's the point with avoiding the terms here, because something similar is happening.

In this situation the GNS terms will not clarify the issue, but confuse it and end up acting as a barrier, which will only become worse as the thread progresses, or become liabilities in future conversations, and people attempt to give you advice based on what you're saying you want (ie: you saying "RAM" but meaning "hard drive" and/or thinking they do the same things).

Your obvious annoyance with and defensive response to the correction on terminological issues, and the certainty that such corrections will happen further on in the thread (when people are trying to use the terms to communicate ideas to you that mean something other to you than what their use is intended to imply), is exactly why the GNS terms need to be avoided, by everyone, further in this discussion unless and until you would be interested in learning them.

That's all. Hopefully my point and the reason I was making it were more clear this time.

Hey there Gnome.

I really wish I knew how to do the quote box thing everyone here is doing. (maybe im just too lazy to look for the way to do it) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions.

It seems you are using a rise and fall mechanic so that when one thing is used the other decreases. That is good. As long as the gains are equal to the losses, I see no problems. Then, a flat-out gain really represents something. But, given your thinking on the three options, I better understand why you resist option one developing into an an increase.

As for tying systems together and still making them modular, this is a problem I am running into with one of my games. Making modular systems is easy. Making modular systems that interact, or talk to one another, is another animal entirely. But it is possible. Here's the little bit of thought I've given it so far.

Bonuses. As long as one system talking with another is related to bonuses only, it doesn't matter if you remove a system, since the only thing that happens is you don't get the bonuses generated from that system. The only problem here comes from difficulty curves. If you base difficulties on certain amounts of bonuses being present (using averages and such) then not having them throws off your calculations. You could use a chart to explain how to modify difficulty based on what systems you are using, but that makes it harder to pick and choose which systems to use, and increases handling time. That is the big limiter, as I see it. Although, if you had a rules set that said something like, "For every system you use, difficulties are increased by X," then you could pull it off, so long as no system offered more bonuses than any other, on average. This would result in more calculations to determine a difficulty, but it might be minute enough (assuming only two or three systems talk to each other in a given sub-set) to be done with only an extra half-second of thought.

As for the morality not tying in to the system to a larger degree, I think its a mistake. It seems to me like more than anything else, you want people to use this system. You want players to get "in character" and stay there. And, in character, you want them to change opinions and views, you want them to grow and evolve. And you want this morality system to guide them. That is all well and good. If your game were about morality only, and nothing else, that would be fine. But, your game is about a whole lot more it seems. You have other systems you want to use, and this one is only tangentially connected at best. That means that a player could play your game and never encounter or want to encounter the morality system.

Now, I understand you want to not close off people. Noble goal, one I happen to be doing and support. But at some point, you have to decide which is more important, an engaging, sound system, or the 25 people of roleplaying sub-group x? If morality is as big a part of your game as it seems to be (and if its not, my point is moot) then it has to tie in to everything. Think of it as groundwork. You have to have a basic rules system and resolution mechanic(s). They can work differently in given sub-systems (skills, social encounters, combat, etc.) but the base system that everything ties into has to be there. If you make that the morality system, then everyone deals with it, and make everything else plug-and-play. Now you have a game that is always about morality, but can sometimes also be about combat, crafting, whatever. Whatever it is your game is most about should be the baseline system. It doesn't need to be this way, in the sense that a game will break or fail without it. It just makes things a lot easier, and it snags certain target audiences right away.

As it stands, I would not be interested in your game. It seems to take to much effort to understand how every sub-system works and interacts, and the pros and cons of adding or dropping one. But if it had a morality framework like I am suggesting, I would be much more comfortable throwing out things I didn't want, or even spending the time to figure out how it all works, just because I had something to start with that was interesting to me: morality.

For example, I'll use the system I'm developing, which I started a thread for (and where the star wars comparison was made by another forge-ite).

In my system, you have Body, Heart, and Mind stats. You also have axioms, divided into Virtues and Vices. These are chosen from a preset list of axioms, which are divided as the player chooses to make their character. Generally speaking, Virtues are the things a character values and strives toward, vices are sticking points and hang-ups, things the character is struggling with. Every time any action is attempted, you use Body, Mind or Heart, and any appropriate virtues or vices. Opponents can also use unclaimed virtues and vices against you, and vice-versa.

Of the 4 different types of magic in my system, 3 are tied to my axiom system and cannot function without it. Only 1 is separate, and it is easily the weakest of the three.

Now, my game isn't modular the way you want yours to be. But I could easily make it so. I could easily throw out the magic system entirely (so long as I heavily tweaked the setting), and still have a functioning game. And the axioms would still matter, because there are a million others things you can do, and they all refer back to the three stats and the axioms. Remove physical combat? sure! You can still do everything else, and morality still matters. Even making a sword requires the axioms, because your intent will determine how well you do.

Which ties in to a comment I read above. You asked why morality should tie in to crafting. Think about your job in real life. Do you always agree with it 100%? I doubt you do, unless you are very privileged or lucky. Occasionally you have to do things you disagree with. If not, think of school, or anything in your life that you didn't agree with but had to do. Do you give it your all in those circumstances? Are you not the least but reluctant? Imagine a pacifist being forced to use his metalworking to make a sword he knows will be used by the military to kill people. He will not make it willingly, and if he is true to himself, he won't make it well, whether he wants to or not. It will happen on a sub-conscious level. That is why I think morality in a system should tie in to everything. But not for every system, just yours, mine, and egon's, because we all care about it to one extent or another.

Anyhow, I hope you find this all helpful, and believe me, I am not trying to goad you or upset you. If you like, let me know and I'll stop posting.

Cheers!
--Norm

Quote from: Ayyavazi on April 10, 2009, 08:44:34 AMI really wish I knew how to do the quote box thing everyone here is doing. (maybe im just too lazy to look for the way to do it) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions.

There's a little quote button at the top-right of each post. If you hit that, it takes you to the posting page, with the entirety of what they said in a quote block.

To quote other people, type {quote author=name}, replacing { and } with [ and ]. After that, copy-paste what you want to reply to, then - after that - put {/quote}, again replacing { } with [ ].

QuoteIt seems you are using a rise and fall mechanic so that when one thing is used the other decreases. That is good. As long as the gains are equal to the losses, I see no problems. Then, a flat-out gain really represents something. But, given your thinking on the three options, I better understand why you resist option one developing into an an increase.

Right now, gains and losses are roughly equal; the lower a virtue's value, the faster it can increase or decrease.

QuoteAs for tying systems together and still making them modular, this is a problem I am running into with one of my games. Making modular systems is easy. Making modular systems that interact, or talk to one another, is another animal entirely. But it is possible. Here's the little bit of thought I've given it so far.

For the most part, the pieces don't *really* need to talk to each other... there is some kind of core that glues them all together, but - for the most part - why does the social encounter stuff need to talk to combat, or crafting? They're tangentially related, at best, and generally not at all.

QuoteBonuses. As long as one system talking with another is related to bonuses only, it doesn't matter if you remove a system, since the only thing that happens is you don't get the bonuses generated from that system.

Yep, which might be how the ethics stuff interacts with social combat.

QuoteThe only problem here comes from difficulty curves.

Only two aspects of the system generally deal with set target numbers; namely, crafting and the general skills system. Combat, for instance, is all opposed rolls. So if ethos impacts social combat via bonuses, then everybody gets them, so it's no big deal.

QuoteAs for the morality not tying in to the system to a larger degree, I think its a mistake. It seems to me like more than anything else, you want people to use this system. You want players to get "in character" and stay there. ... You have other systems you want to use, and this one is only tangentially connected at best. That means that a player could play your game and never encounter or want to encounter the morality system.

Yes, that's what I want. But that does not necessarily mean that anyone who picks up the game is going to want it.

QuoteNow, I understand you want to not close off people. Noble goal, one I happen to be doing and support. But at some point, you have to decide which is more important, an engaging, sound system, or the 25 people of roleplaying sub-group x? If morality is as big a part of your game as it seems to be (and if its not, my point is moot) then it has to tie in to everything. ... If you make that the morality system, then everyone deals with it, and make everything else plug-and-play. Now you have a game that is always about morality, but can sometimes also be about combat, crafting, whatever. Whatever it is your game is most about should be the baseline system.

Why not grab both? The ethos system is an option, albeit a big one that impacts how the game is played - but in that sense it's no different from using the combat system, or completely ignoring the crafting system.

The whole point of modularity is to allow a group of players to decide what they want to play, and the point of scalability of complexity is to allow them to decide how they want to play it. The only exception to this should be the core, which should be the center upon which the rest of the subsystems are placed; in a sense, the core of the game will be very, very small, probably to the point where you'll need another subsystem to combine it with, or else it won't do much.

QuoteAs it stands, I would not be interested in your game. It seems to take to much effort to understand how every sub-system works and interacts, and the pros and cons of adding or dropping one. But if it had a morality framework like I am suggesting, I would be much more comfortable throwing out things I didn't want, or even spending the time to figure out how it all works, just because I had something to start with that was interesting to me: morality.

There is minimal interaction between subsystems, and it's designed to allow you to pick and choose. What more do you need to know about the combat subsystem, other than that it deals with combat? Does it interact with other subsystems - it might (it doesn't, but just for argument's sake, say you don't know). If you know that the system is designed to be modular, to allow you to pick up the pieces you want and ignore the rest - why is it so difficult to get rid of what you don't want?

QuoteNow, my game isn't modular the way you want yours to be. But I could easily make it so. I could easily throw out the magic system entirely (so long as I heavily tweaked the setting), and still have a functioning game. And the axioms would still matter, because there are a million others things you can do, and they all refer back to the three stats and the axioms.

Why should the ethics subsystem be so different from the others that it becomes the core around which the game is built?

QuoteDo you give it your all in those circumstances? Are you not the least but reluctant? Imagine a pacifist being forced to use his metalworking to make a sword he knows will be used by the military to kill people. He will not make it willingly, and if he is true to himself, he won't make it well, whether he wants to or not. It will happen on a sub-conscious level. That is why I think morality in a system should tie in to everything.

If something is worth doing, then you do it right.

In your pacifist example, he must not believe very much in pacifism, or else he would simply refuse to do the work on principle. But we could go on and on with this example, you providing reasons why he would despite his beliefs, and so on, and I'm not interested in that discussion. Suffice to say that I disagree with you on this topic.

QuoteThere is minimal interaction between subsystems, and it's designed to allow you to pick and choose. What more do you need to know about the combat subsystem, other than that it deals with combat? Does it interact with other subsystems - it might (it doesn't, but just for argument's sake, say you don't know). If you know that the system is designed to be modular, to allow you to pick up the pieces you want and ignore the rest - why is it so difficult to get rid of what you don't want?

You are probably the kind of person is very comfortable reading a heading in a book like yours will be and saying, "Yeah, I don't want combat in my game, so I'll skip reading this section." Or maybe you don't mind reading a lot of stuff and then thinking about how it will work. But not everyone is like that, of course.

For example, what about completists? you know, those people who need to do everything you can do in a game just because they want to complete it? They are going to look at your system and either have the strength of will to put it all together, or they are going to say, "It doesn't feel right to not use system x, but its too complicated to include it all. Guess I'll go play Fudge or something." You are potentially closing off this group by virtue of having such an expansive system. But this can't be helped, really, because completists like me are odd, stubborn people. All I'm trying to show you is that you can't include everyone, no matter how hard you try. It simply isn't possible. Then again, if it is, it would probably take a tome of about 1000 pages, which means the book would probably cost close to 50 or 100 dollars. And I'll tell you right now, many people would not be interested in shelling out that kind of money for something they aren't sure is worth it.

QuoteThere is minimal interaction between subsystems, and it's designed to allow you to pick and choose. What more do you need to know about the combat subsystem, other than that it deals with combat? Does it interact with other subsystems - it might (it doesn't, but just for argument's sake, say you don't know). If you know that the system is designed to be modular, to allow you to pick up the pieces you want and ignore the rest - why is it so difficult to get rid of what you don't want?

I sort of answered this partially above. But as for why its so hard, let me throw out some imaginary numbers. Lets say your game has 10 systems. and each system takes between 10 and 50 pages to include. Now lets say that only half of your systems talk to one other system, so five talking pairs, possibly connected, however little they may be. This means I have to read 100 pages (minimum) to grasp all of the systems, then keep in mind the five pairs (roughly 50 of the 100 pages (minimum), and then decide what I'm going to throw out. Sure, this decision is based more on what I want my version of the game to be about, but lets say I adopt 6 of the systems, and use 2 pairs of interacting systems.

This means I am using a minimum of 60 pages of text, and 20-40 of them are going to be cross-referenced regularly in order to understand how my paired systems interact. This means plenty of page flipping, especially if I am unlucky enough to have chosen systems that aren't conveniently clumped together.

Now, lets say I get a group of 3 others together. Lets say I'm a really lucky guy and two of the other players have purchased and read the book. Lets go further and say I am super lucky and one of those two has previous experience with this game. What about person number 4? The guy who doesn't have a clue. How do I summarize those 60+ pages of work for him? How do I explain the way the systems I've chosen interact? And what happens if my luck has run out and he isn't willing to read the 60+ pages of material in order to understand it all? Or even if he did, how do we play the game without constantly flipping through the rule-book every 5 minutes to understand how system 2 works?

Now, once all those hurdles are cleared, how do we keep everyone in character? Every five minutes the new guy asks a question that breaks the flow, and then at best 3 people flip through their books frantically while he sits there bored out of his skull. And thats all assuming he is a simulationist of the type that would enjoy your game.

I'm not deriding you or your design. Believe me, I like what you are doing and will probably buy a copy when its all published (providing I can afford it. Try to keep it under $30, just for me?).

Thats the reason there has to be a clear indication of how to combine things, beyond it simply being, "well, its modular. just add what you want." Here's how I solved the above problem for one of the systems I am designing

I made a base. That is I said when I play my own game, here is what I am most likely to include, and here is how it works. Then I write it up as if it were the rules. Then, I re-write all the modules separately and explain how they interact in the example. Now, new players to the game can just play the example with minimal page-flipping (at least compared to the other method). And, everyone else trying to learn the game has an example framework they can work from to understand how to implement modules. You don't even have to make your example part of your publication (which would increase your page count and consequently your purchase price) you could just make it a free pdf that you get for purchasing the book.

QuoteIf something is worth doing, then you do it right.

You have this as a personal belief. I won't criticize that. On one level, I fully agree with you. But what it might be important to understand is that not all people think this way. In fact, if your defense against my argument is that statement, that means that that statement needs to be in your game somewhere. People need to know that as far as their characters are concerned, they will always have that philosophy, which explains why they do things they don't agree with at full potential.

I think few people honestly do everything they do right, whether they believe in it or not. They simply aren't that strong. You do. That's awesome. But since you aren't interested about the pacifism example (or I suspect any example), I'll go at it this way. What about people that want to be able to do things reluctantly? If they care enough to have their characters be so in depth that they can work against themselves on a sub-conscious level because of their beliefs. As is, your system doesn't allow this. Sure, it could be easily hacked with players giving their characters penalties based on their morality, but that's a weak solution really, since the system doesn't encourage it through rewards. If your system encourages such a penalty through a reward of some kind, people are more likely to do it. At least most people are. Some people don't need re-inforcement to do things. They will work because it is what they are supposed to do. Personally, I think most people need incentives, or they start doing shoddy work. Evidence: anything made by underpaid people versus the same thing made by well-paid people. Which product has the higher quality? If you really want your game to work in similar ways to the real world, at least in the sense of how ethics and morality influence our daily lives, then the system needs to be indicative of that. Otherwise, you alienate certain people.

I hope this answers your questions. As for your peers threatening to leave the project, would that be such a bad thing? I mean, would you be able to continue work on the project otherwise?  If you could go on without them, it may be worth it to try changing their minds a tad more. Explain how open-mindedness is part of your game, so it should probably be part of the design team too. Of course, taking advice from me on this topic may not be the best idea. I have shut off plenty of people to myself because I indicated they need to be more open-minded. There's a good reason I only have one or two good friends after all. Anyhow, I am looking forward to this game, and will at the very least buy a PDF of it when its out.

Cheers,

--Norm

Gnomeworks,

       I understand that you hate pawn stance; that's a pet peeve of mine too. On the other hand, you don't want the mechanics to force players to play out their characters' personalities. That's a contradiction: to make the players play a certain way without making them  :-S

The only other option I can see is to just encourage them to play as their characters' roles, i.e. nurture any interest they may have in adopting their characters' roles. However, for this to work, the players themselves must be willing to go at least half way.

Dan

Ok, Gnomeworks, you want to watch interesting characters. Someone else starts playing in pawn stance. It's not about whether they are saying "my guy says he wants this" rather than "I want this", because you can cope with that kind of narration for physical actions, so what stops you thinking about it as a proper character?

Basically, you've said you don't care how the player sees it, so you don't really care what stance they are in, only that when watching them you can pretend that they are following a specific character. So what happens if they do something their character "would never do". Can't you just adjust your expectations to what the character actually does, and have people start to treat him differently? If his background and behaviour don't match, then anyone who knows his background will say things like "but he was such a good trainee in the monastery??", or something like that.

So if player expectation doesn't matter, only that you see a world of real characters, then that one player always plays crazy characters. Ones that have sudden breaks in behaviour because of inexplicable reasons (read out of game events). You can tell people that as far as all the characters are concerned, his guy will appear mental, and instead of doing it GM "voice from on-high", do it through NPCs.

This is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible. It is as hardcore because when someone says, "My guy is going to steal from his neighbour" even though he is supposedly his trusting friend for years, you play all the in character results of this. The game runs remorselessly on, with him beginning to get a reputation for being untrustworthy. Perhaps his neighbour will forgive him, perhaps he will need to understand before he will trust him again. You get the idea. In-character based feedback encourages in-character based decision making, or something that looks like it. If it doesn't, then it will be abundantly clear that their characters are incompatible and they will give up on it, just because they aren't getting what they want. On the other hand, if they work with it they will be playing as they want without the rules playing their character's decisions for them. In other words, you could want a strong reputation/social identity mechanic.

I've also explored rules-influenced characters, via mind control rules or later when considering epic flawed heroes. The idea is that people can challenge the portrayal and turn it into something different, but the advantage that the owner player has over any other is that they can say why they do their thing. It allows them to veto roll-offs for their characters intentions by adding personality traits. In this way the rules are the players weapon to play the way they want to. It works, but not for everything! It can really annoy people who just want to show their character though play and not through description on a sheet. And it can slow down stuff so much if your not careful.

Secondly you mentioned not wanting to know the response of an NPC, and have "them" tell you. You do realise that to truly do that you need to invent artificial life? :P Until then what you have is a system to inspire you.

You've probably heard enough about how characters are just numbers on a sheet. I disagree, characters are mental and social constructs, which we try to make coherent between different people's imaginations, if not exactly the same. This is that an objective of creating a shared imaginary space, and we use paper, pens and conventions to help us do that, among other things. But nevertheless, the generation method, the process occurs inside a human being, as an extension of the processes that we do when expressing our own personality. You cannot remove the people from it until you invent strong AI !

Is this a bad time to point out that any one persons understanding of another being is also exists in their head, basedf on their interpretation of what they have excperienced relative to said person? So fiction or not, when talking about a third party, the experience can be very much the same if you let it be.

For instance in actual play I have made up characters co-workers and relations, and talked about them in a consistant enough way that players were surprised to discover the characters weren't created by someone else with authorial credibility. In RL we would clal this lying about someone existing I suppose.

My point being that while a ton of personality type stats can help the GM be more true to the given setting, and creative, including by providing results they wouldn't have choosen and thus freeing them from the sensation that they are choosing every little detail of a situation that all the people in a game have to find a way to let the other characters come alive in their minds. You can't force it, but if you can't do it yourself you need to learn the trick that will help you.

I myself use a simple few techniques: my NPCs don't always do the smart thing, know everything, or explain why they did anything. I just drop the signs hinting at why they might have done so. A little silence lets the players fill in the world, and if they want to know more they interact with the NPC to find it out.

Quote from: JoyWriter on April 16, 2009, 02:53:49 PM
Ok, Gnomeworks, you want to watch interesting characters. Someone else starts playing in pawn stance. It's not about whether they are saying "my guy says he wants this" rather than "I want this", because you can cope with that kind of narration for physical actions, so what stops you thinking about it as a proper character?

Umm, maybe becuase its not a proper character?

QuoteBasically, you've said you don't care how the player sees it, so you don't really care what stance they are in, only that when watching them you can pretend that they are following a specific character. So what happens if they do something their character "would never do".

Why would they do that.  Explain.

Quote
Can't you just adjust your expectations to what the character actually does, and have people start to treat him differently? If his background and behaviour don't match, then anyone who knows his background will say things like "but he was such a good trainee in the monastery??", or something like that.

Yes; but that leads to a game-breaking conclusion: all PC's are mad.

QuoteSo if player expectation doesn't matter, only that you see a world of real characters, then that one player always plays crazy characters.

Worse, from my perspective: ALL players play crazy characters.  Thus actual play devolves to: a day out for the insane asylum.

QuoteOnes that have sudden breaks in behaviour because of inexplicable reasons (read out of game events). You can tell people that as far as all the characters are concerned, his guy will appear mental, and instead of doing it GM "voice from on-high", do it through NPCs.

..which therefore becomes GM constraint.

QuoteThis is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible.

It is not more flexible it is crude.  If the player wanted to be "a traitorous bastard", why did they not take that as  a trait at the outset and thus allow th GM to plan accordingly?

QuoteYou get the idea. In-character based feedback encourages in-character based decision making, or something that looks like it.

And in-characer definition allows the GM to plan for the practical eventualities.  I fail to see how any of this justifies blind-siding the GM.

Quote
Secondly you mentioned not wanting to know the response of an NPC, and have "them" tell you. You do realise that to truly do that you need to invent artificial life? :P Until then what you have is a system to inspire you.

Yes.  That does not, however, invalidate the point.

QuoteYou cannot remove the people from it until you invent strong AI !

And you can't remove the rules from it until you remove the people.  QED.

Quote from: AyyavaziYou are probably the kind of person is very comfortable reading a heading in a book like yours will be and saying, "Yeah, I don't want combat in my game, so I'll skip reading this section." Or maybe you don't mind reading a lot of stuff and then thinking about how it will work. But not everyone is like that, of course.

That's not how the system is set up, in terms of where things are.

Right now, the idea is that there is a core, with very basic and simple mechanics for each of the primary subsystems. Then, each subsystem has its own book, that adds detail and depth and such.

QuoteThey are going to look at your system and either have the strength of will to put it all together, or they are going to say, ...

It's not that hard to put the pieces together. Combat is largely independent of social encounter mechanics; they're designed that way, so that the system is modular.

QuoteNow lets say that only half of your systems talk to one other system, so five talking pairs, possibly connected, however little they may be.

This is a hefty overestimation. We're trying to keep subsystem crosstalk to a minimum, to avoid exactly the problem you're talking about here.

QuoteIf they care enough to have their characters be so in depth that they can work against themselves on a sub-conscious level because of their beliefs. As is, your system doesn't allow this. Sure, it could be easily hacked with players giving their characters penalties based on their morality, but that's a weak solution really, since the system doesn't encourage it through rewards. If your system encourages such a penalty through a reward of some kind, people are more likely to do it.

I'm not interested in this kind of internal drama. It is sometimes interesting, yes, but honestly, this is getting into what my co-developers and I call "carbohydrate land" - named such because I was meandering down the path, one day, of dealing with food's nutritional values in-game. This was rapidly deemed a bad call, because (1) it's too ridiculous, and (2) way too complex.

Trying to get into varying levels of consciousness in a character may be heading down that path. Perhaps there is something that could be done - contrasting conscious virtues to subconscious, for instance - but that would rapidly spiral into absurdity.

At some point, a line must be drawn.

Quote from: ShallowThoughtsThe only other option I can see is to just encourage them to play as their characters' roles, i.e. nurture any interest they may have in adopting their characters' roles. However, for this to work, the players themselves must be willing to go at least half way.

Reliance upon the player to do what they're supposed to do is not a thing that I want to do. While most players will not try to game the system, I tend to envision the worst possible group ever conceived when it comes to that sort of thing, and try to envision ways to stop them from doing things "wrong," as it were.

Quote from: JoyWriterThis is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible.

You may think so. I disagree. I want these things dealt with at the systemic level, not the instance (read: individual game) level. Some GMs are going to be pushovers, and you need to account for that.

QuoteSecondly you mentioned not wanting to know the response of an NPC, and have "them" tell you. You do realise that to truly do that you need to invent artificial life? :P Until then what you have is a system to inspire you.

This reminds me a lot of the whole "how can you care about realism when there are dragons that breathe fire etc etc" arguments that arise when someone talks about wanting realism in a game.

Yes, I realize that in order to have NPCs completely and utterly inform me of their actions, that would require artificial intelligence. This is an obvious thing to say. The point was that I want NPCs to give me an idea of what they want to do.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 16, 2009, 08:54:01 PM

Quote from: ShallowThoughtsThe only other option I can see is to just encourage them to play as their characters' roles, i.e. nurture any interest they may have in adopting their characters' roles. However, for this to work, the players themselves must be willing to go at least half way.

Reliance upon the player to do what they're supposed to do is not a thing that I want to do. While most players will not try to game the system, I tend to envision the worst possible group ever conceived when it comes to that sort of thing, and try to envision ways to stop them from doing things "wrong," as it were.

I hate to sound authoritative, because I actually know very little :-D but..  you're asking the impossible. This is how I imagine things playing out if your mechanics could speak:

"
Mechanics: Okay, GM, ensure your players follow my rules. Players, here are your personalities.
GM & Players: Okay
Player 1: Cool, I get to play a <certain imagining of character>
Mechanics: NO! You're not playing the character correctly.
Player 1: Sure I am, that's what the character sheet says.
Mechanics: No! You're interpreting the numbers wrong. GM, you tell him.
GM: Actually .. he's not wrong. I don't see anything in the rules that says he can't play those numbers with that interpretation.
Mechanics: But .. but it's in the numbers. It's obvious!
GM: Not really. The way he's playing the numbers is legal by the rules.
Mechanics: But .. that's not how it was originally intended.
"

Obviously, this is a little silly but I hope you see my point. You can't imbue your mechanics with your intentions. You can only write up your mechanics and hope for the best. Even if you COULD imbue your true intentions, you can't force people to follow them. The "worst group possible" that I can envision has already dropped your book and gone to play a different game. What's left is people who aren't the worst group possible, and of these, again, you must hope they come at least half way.

Dan

Hi GW,

This threads getting a little frazzled. When I last checked it sounded like that you'd grant that players change character persona, but you just wanted them to adjust the numbers to follow what they change too. I'm assuming either they may spend points, potentially having to save up to change persona, or they can just change the values and this says to you as GM "Yes, I grant I have changed my characters personality, by having changed these numbers. And these numbers help you get how he's changed in personality". Which seemed pretty reasonable and useful. If it is what I thought, good, but the thread seems to have meandered from that? Perhaps start a fresh one based on that? If it wasn't, just making a quick post in case it helped your project :)

Hey Contracycle, I'm not really sure how to do this post-splitting reply business compactly, but I'll give it a go:

Quote from: contracycle on April 16, 2009, 08:06:19 PM

Quote from: JoyWriter on April 16, 2009, 02:53:49 PM
Ok, Gnomeworks, you want to watch interesting characters. Someone else starts playing in pawn stance. It's not about whether they are saying "my guy says he wants this" rather than "I want this", because you can cope with that kind of narration for physical actions, so what stops you thinking about it as a proper character?

Umm, maybe becuase its not a proper character?

Ok, either we're at cross purposes or you think that talking in the third person is universally bad. I'm guessing it's the former; the point I was hoping to make is that we tolerate 3rd person narration for times when the characters voice is not how they are expressing themselves, such as "he leans on the bar, almost creaking from exhaustion" or "he thrusts his sword quickly into the beasts belly" or something. Now some people prefer it if character actions are expressed as if the character was saying it as much as possible, even down to narrating action intentions in character as some form of internal monologue, but I wanted to suggest that the things he was interested in could be seen when ignoring this level.

So if that is not the issue, what is? As I understood it GnomeWorks is interested in well rounded characters with proper motivations, and it is characters without proper in-fiction motivations that he specifically wants to ban, preferably by creating guides that help people make better ones.

Quote from: contracycle on April 16, 2009, 08:06:19 PM

QuoteBasically, you've said you don't care how the player sees it, so you don't really care what stance they are in, only that when watching them you can pretend that they are following a specific character. So what happens if they do something their character "would never do".

Why would they do that.  Explain.

Quote
Can't you just adjust your expectations to what the character actually does, and have people start to treat him differently? If his background and behaviour don't match, then anyone who knows his background will say things like "but he was such a good trainee in the monastery??", or something like that.

Yes; but that leads to a game-breaking conclusion: all PC's are mad.

QuoteSo if player expectation doesn't matter, only that you see a world of real characters, then that one player always plays crazy characters.

Worse, from my perspective: ALL players play crazy characters.  Thus actual play devolves to: a day out for the insane asylum.

So if it's all about motivation and character realism, how do you deal with a player who is not participating?
Well 1, can you work out their motivations anyway? In other words, can you act as if they are a well played character by looking at their actual actions, just like you would with a character you read about in a book? I suspect such a success would end up with a mix between who they are supposed to be playing and their own personality, which has happened with me in many a game with certain players; I went full immersion and just mixed what I knew of my friend into what I knew of the character they were playing, producing a composite motivation that allowed my character to work with his.

As for 2, well then we get into what they "would never do" when the actions of the player characters go outside the bounds of making things fit, they just don't make sense, because the contradict things that have either been stated to be important to the character in fiction or on a sheet. Now one approach is deception; assuming the character is lying or being self-deceptive. This produces the most amazing conversations, where one character takes another up on who they say they are, and in the course of it the players learn something about roleplay psychology, and the character goes through one of those self-discovery moments. Now I'm not talking stupid "one tree hill" "what'cha gotta realise is" dialog, all ultimatums and platitudes, but situations that build character, in the character if you see what I mean. Taking 1d characters through the required journey to make them substantial.

The other is insanity/intentional incomprehensibility, of the worst sides of chaotic neutral or "mad character" play. I say worst, because in my more chilled out moods mental swings can be pretty fun to play through, as part of playing surreal consequence free games. But in a game of proper well drawn characters, that's anathema.

Now both of these are extremes, and I suspect it can be too easy to declare that complex motivations are simply incomprehensible and random. I wouldn't say that the PCs are mad, I've already suggested that a character can be found to be consistent even when a player plays them badly; if your good enough at finding motivation, you can turn the lightswitch paladin into someone who uses it as a cloak for his own ends, or someone who believes themselves to be justified in doing a little evil for their greater good. Then you can create situations to tease out the difference. I used the extreme example because I wanted to show how even severely disruptive play can be handled from an in-fiction perspective.

Do you agree with this, or do you feel that there is something about PCs as characters that can never be explained using only in-fiction tools? Something that makes them inherently mad from an NPC perspective? (feel free to defy the question if you can think of a better one!)

Quote from: contracycle on April 16, 2009, 08:06:19 PM

QuoteOnes that have sudden breaks in behaviour because of inexplicable reasons (read out of game events). You can tell people that as far as all the characters are concerned, his guy will appear mental, and instead of doing it GM "voice from on-high", do it through NPCs.

..which therefore becomes GM constraint.

QuoteThis is control by feedback, and it is just as hardcore as rules based control, but more flexible.

It is not more flexible it is crude.  If the player wanted to be "a traitorous bastard", why did they not take that as  a trait at the outset and thus allow th GM to plan accordingly?

QuoteYou get the idea. In-character based feedback encourages in-character based decision making, or something that looks like it.

And in-characer definition allows the GM to plan for the practical eventualities.  I fail to see how any of this justifies blind-siding the GM.

Oh yeah, this is serious GM constraint! That's why I said it was as hardcore as the "roll for motivation" idea. It's a fair point to ask why the player did not define their character from the start as someone who will betray close friends, but to be honest many people just don't think about characters that way, they might just do it without considering the ripple effects in their relationships, and this is supposed to be able to cope with such people, even be useful to them. The idea is that instead of backing up and saying "no, your supposed to be the hero", you take the character as played, and have everyone act towards them appropriately. This creates an in-fiction expression of what was un-heroic about their action.

The trick of such a system is supposed to be that people, as learners, will be able to smell out the feedback loops of the situation, and understand when things aren't working, so instead of automating the very bit that the player is supposed to be learning, you put a context around them that deals with them as if they were doing it intentionally. If constructivist learning theory is correct, when dealing with a system that provides consistent response/action loops, people can actually internalise those patterns and get used to working with them. This is in contrast to learning to copy a dice roll system, which although valuable, may not express the multilayered motivational elements of a single action. And more broadly it's like the difference between learning by rote and learning by experiment.

My idea is that if you want to create a framework for teaching character identity, the best framework is a social one, or one that responds to identity concerns as if it were social (ie a magic system would also work). It's not really my idea, it's to do with the idea of the social construction of identity, and I have my issues with it, but because it comes from a very external and mechanistic perspective it seems a perfect fit to the mechanical and statistics inspired perspective already evident in the system.

What you call in-character definition I'm guessing means "on the character sheet" definition, whereas in-character definition as in "through play" definition is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It could make planning difficult, and unpredictable players always do, but it might be eased if you have a social system that already gives you the general parameters of response, perhaps even based on the MtG colour wheel, except as virtues you "exhibit" rather than ones you hold to.

Personally I think it is very valuable to consider what the player thinks about stuff, as a tool to help you make games smoother and better for everyone. But given the constraints of the original posters objectives, which I paraphrased as;
"Create a system that stops people breaking immersion with characters that are rubbish without chucking them out of the game, in some way that helps them learn to stop leaning on the rules system over time and do it themselves. But this rule system must be compatible with the preferences of my co-writers not to directly interfere with character portrayal decisions, although apart from that player motivations are irrelevant.",
given those objectives, I thought the fit was an external behaviourist/constructivist approach that ignores player motivation and treats the character as a black-box that is revealed through play, and interacts with it purely on revealed information regardless of "author intent".

Now you know what I mean, what do you think?

Quote from: ShallowThoughts on April 17, 2009, 02:45:17 AMPlayer 1: Cool, I get to play a <certain imagining of character>
Mechanics: NO! You're not playing the character correctly.
Player 1: Sure I am, that's what the character sheet says.
Mechanics: No! You're interpreting the numbers wrong. GM, you tell him.

It's not like the game would tell you what a character does in a given situation, nor how those virtues came to be valued by the character, nor - necessarily - how they are executed.

Obviously some are a little more grey than others. Not much that can be done about that.

The reason we use direct opposites - or at least as direct as possible - is to avoid the situation you are talking about. It is much harder to say that a given interpretation is right or wrong when you're dealing with "white and black," as it were. Where you fall in the white or black is a shade of grey.

QuoteThe "worst group possible" that I can envision has already dropped your book and gone to play a different game. What's left is people who aren't the worst group possible, and of these, again, you must hope they come at least half way.

There are varying kinds of "worst groups possible."

Regardless, though, what is perhaps more important is not the worst group possible, but the newest group possible. In addition to the worst group possible, I try to envision how a group of 16-year-olds, with no prior experience with tabletop gaming, sitting down with these rules would handle them.

For them, the point of the virtues is to help solidify the character concept, to establish that the character and the player are two different people.

Quote from: Callan S.When I last checked it sounded like that you'd grant that players change character persona, but you just wanted them to adjust the numbers to follow what they change too. ... Which seemed pretty reasonable and useful. If it is what I thought, good, but the thread seems to have meandered from that?

Yes, that is currently the general idea. There have been some useful suggestions made upthread, which I haven't had the time to digest fully, which may lead to a change in how this subsystem works.

And yes, the thread has gotten slightly derailed, but is still generally dealing with the question at hand and still relevant to resolving it.

Quote from: JoyWriter on April 19, 2009, 09:09:03 PM
So if that is not the issue, what is? As I understood it GnomeWorks is interested in well rounded characters with proper motivations, and it is characters without proper in-fiction motivations that he specifically wants to ban, preferably by creating guides that help people make better ones.

The issue is characters that are divorced from their setting, that act as if in ignorance of the setting they inhabit.  The Pendragon traits were not simply any view of morality, they were an articulation of the specific morality of the chivalric romance; their appearence in the system thus serves as prompt and guide for playing within that setting.  Characters are not "proper" if they ignore such influences and behave in a manner that disregards the fiction.

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So if it's all about motivation and character realism, how do you deal with a player who is not participating?

As in a player that is not present?  That's not a solvable problem IMO.

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Now both of these are extremes, and I suspect it can be too easy to declare that complex motivations are simply incomprehensible and random. I wouldn't say that the PCs are mad, I've already suggested that a character can be found to be consistent even when a player plays them badly; if your good enough at finding motivation, you can turn the lightswitch paladin into someone who uses it as a cloak for his own ends, or someone who believes themselves to be justified in doing a little evil for their greater good. Then you can create situations to tease out the difference. I used the extreme example because I wanted to show how even severely disruptive play can be handled from an in-fiction perspective.

Tihs makes little sense to me for two reasons; firstly becuase playing in pawn stance essentially precludes complex motivations, because the character is just a token to be moved around, and secondly because you have only discussed consistency in terms of the characters previously established behaviour, not in terms of the behaviour expected in the setting.  Playing a complex paladin first requires that you be aware of the behaviours espected of a paladin; if you simply ignore those expectations, then violations of those expectations are not complex at all.  It just appears to be crazy.

QuoteDo you agree with this, or do you feel that there is something about PCs as characters that can never be explained using only in-fiction tools? Something that makes them inherently mad from an NPC perspective? (feel free to defy the question if you can think of a better one!)

No, what I am saying is that when characters are portrayed in ways that violate the social expectations of the setting, then they behave in a way that must necessarily appear to be crazy to NPC's.  And that leavesa the GM with an unenvious choice between ignoring their antisocial behaviours, or turning all disciplinarian - neither of which is, IMO, a healthy form of play.  Behavioural mechanics, serving as prompt and guide to players, are expressions of the fiction which are pertinent to player choices, and are set out for them on the character sheet.

Basically, prevention is better than cure.  Establishing contextual mores explicitly so that significant lines are crossed accidentally or in ignorance obviates having to take corrective action once they are crossed - or makes that corrective action something the player has bought into themselves and has chosen deliberately.

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Oh yeah, this is serious GM constraint! That's why I said it was as hardcore as the "roll for motivation" idea. It's a fair point to ask why the player did not define their character from the start as someone who will betray close friends, but to be honest many people just don't think about characters that way, they might just do it without considering the ripple effects in their relationships, and this is supposed to be able to cope with such people, even be useful to them. The idea is that instead of backing up and saying "no, your supposed to be the hero", you take the character as played, and have everyone act towards them appropriately. This creates an in-fiction expression of what was un-heroic about their action.

Yes, but it also obviates everything else.  The game turns into a sort of "stranger in a strange land" kind of thing, in which the the in-fiction action is derailed toward setting exposition alone.  And especially within a group, if one player is violating expactations, and thus causing consequences for the others as well, then those other players have ceased to be relevant - they have become hangers on to one characters act of self-discovery.  That's a full blown breakdown IMO, a game effectively hijacked by one player.  And if the whole group is doing it, then you end up with a situation in which the GM is continually rescuing characters from the implicit consequences of their actions - which effectively means, discounting their contribution to the fiction - or applying ever escalating coercion that can reach the point of a TPK.

I mean you seem to assume that such GM coercion can be soft and gradual, but this is not necessarily the case for in-fiction reasons.  Committing a serious social blunder might poison an NPC's responses toward that character forever - or oblige the GM to make excuses for why it does not.  Sufficiently egregious behaviour could provoke social sanctions up to an including the ultimate penalty, or something else that renders the PC unplayable or requires them to be separated from the other characters.  So yes, this sort of in-fiction GM constraint is certainly "hard core", becomes the dominating concern of the game - to the detriment of what the game was originally conceived of being about.

QuoteThe trick of such a system is supposed to be that people, as learners, will be able to smell out the feedback loops of the situation, and understand when things aren't working, so instead of automating the very bit that the player is supposed to be learning, you put a context around them that deals with them as if they were doing it intentionally. If constructivist learning theory is correct, when dealing with a system that provides consistent response/action loops, people can actually internalise those patterns and get used to working with them. This is in contrast to learning to copy a dice roll system, which although valuable, may not express the multilayered motivational elements of a single action. And more broadly it's like the difference between learning by rote and learning by experiment.

I disagree - just because a mechanic appears on the character sheet doesn't mean that players simply copy it.  All it means is that the mechanic is ever present and is considered a fundamental part of what the player is concerned about.  Which seems only right and proper to me - learning can occur through seeing trigger conditions before you trip them, not only by tripping them and dealing with the consequences.  For players to learn by "smelling out" the implicit system first requires that they actually survive long enough and keep playing long enough to deduce the underlying principles; if your GM is compelled to take in fiction corrective action, characters may suffer consequences that prevent that longevity.  It's just another form of "guess what the GM wants you to do", instead of laying out in advance what sort of things are expected.  The mechanic serves that laying out function.

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What you call in-character definition I'm guessing means "on the character sheet" definition, whereas in-character definition as in "through play" definition is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. It could make planning difficult, and unpredictable players always do, but it might be eased if you have a social system that already gives you the general parameters of response, perhaps even based on the MtG colour wheel, except as virtues you "exhibit" rather than ones you hold to.

Yes exactly, a social system, visible to the player, presented to them before they take actions that bump heads.  I did not mean in-character definition to apply opnly to pre-play creation, I specifically intended to include violations of a characters previously established behaviour.  If the character is a pawn, then the player is not going to concern themslves with that much.  But if you control the moves which are valid for the pawn, then it may not become too disruptive.

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given those objectives, I thought the fit was an external behaviourist/constructivist approach that ignores player motivation and treats the character as a black-box that is revealed through play, and interacts with it purely on revealed information regardless of "author intent".

I wouldn't say "ignores" so much as "informs", and authorial intent is dubious unless and until the socially expressed mores are fully internalised.  But that requires a method for them to become internalised, and that method is system.

Hey contracycle, first of all I get the idea of metal stats, such as motivations, relationships or something like the what I call the "moodswing" system from Runeslayers, they're really valuable. The question is how they interact with player choice. Now I like incentive systems that use experience or localised bonuses, they're really cool, but what does it mean to use such stats as cast iron limits on player action? Do you generate the character opinions and reactions from the system, and have the player act them out? This was GnomeWorks first idea, but still produces the problem of interpretation "was that really in his interests given what he is supposedly motivated by in this instant?", which is not conducive to cast iron limits, it's too floppy.
So instead, I suggested that you look at the character from the outside: You say that pawn stance precludes complex motivation, and that might be true if you consider the player and character separately, but what if you just look at the two as a unit?
I mentioned before that players can build a characterisation from their natural actions, and you can then impute a character on them, saying "the world sees you like this" and having NPCs react appropriately. You're right that prevention is better than cure, and that is why I suggested that you have an explicit reaction system; it tells players how their character will be reacted to if he behaves in a certain way, rather than telling him how his character behaves.

Your dead right about the social expectations and crazyness, but not all pawn stance play will be outside of those limits. In fact, if you make those limits explicit; just like fire will burn their character or a wall is impassible, then most players, pawn stance or not, will stay inside them, thus making characters appropriate to the setting.

So just like players can learn the combat system and so fit into combat roles over time, they could learn the social system and avoid the problems of being treated as crazy! Actually you say the same yourself, so looks like we have been in agreement all this time, at least in part.

The same consequences you mention, and I see the problem, occur when dealing with life and death combat; we had one player once run off into a dangerous area, and almost cause TPK. You're dead right about indirect consequences, I didn't consider that. The thing is, we except that someone may cause problems for the group in a combat situation, why not in a social situation too? Can't we use the same methods to deal with both?

There is a general problem of insuring that players have information appropriate to the consequences, avoiding a sort of injustice that can occur when people randomly insult a king and get their heads chopped off before they know it! One method is revealing the consequences "the character would know" during resolution, another is adding hints in framing narration, and possibly expecting people to use knowledge skills to scope this stuff out.

One method I have used before, which I probably should have mentioned explicitly, is when the GM sets up conflicts as a way of teaching players the ground rules of the setting, especially useful for those who learn by doing or can't be bothered to read the rule book! This is the kind of soft consequence I meant, and your right, sometimes it's better just to read the rules, but after a few semi-dangerous encounters people quickly understand how things work, providing you make them the right way. I hope the same could apply to character consistency

I can't decide whether such information should be on the character sheet or not; I suspect by analogy with combat systems it should be split between some kind of GM record, and something on the players sheet that relates to change. I can imagine in some games instead of a combat map you would have a relationship map and causing alterations to it is recorded there, whereas the player sheet has some more generalised information about what sort of effect their skills can do in terms of social and physical effects. But in other systems yeah, I can see it all being on the character sheet.

As a general principle, based on taking physical considerations out of gameplay, I prefer it if information that should be publicly available is in the centre of the table, just to stop people having to check each other's character sheets all the time to find out their defences or negative traits excreta. It allows you to work the game with less cooperative players (read under 15s) without the game stalling because someone is being stupid.

So I hope you can see, I'm not suggesting that we remove explicit, designed, system from the equation, just that we put it on the outside of player character decisions, influencing but not fully determining them, as a "roll to see what you decide" system would. The point I was trying to make is that this form of control can be just as specific in it's in-character results as the rolled system, but hopefully more player friendly.

Quote from: GnomeWorks on April 20, 2009, 06:34:50 AM
Regardless, though, what is perhaps more important is not the worst group possible, but the newest group possible. In addition to the worst group possible, I try to envision how a group of 16-year-olds, with no prior experience with tabletop gaming, sitting down with these rules would handle them.

For them, the point of the virtues is to help solidify the character concept, to establish that the character and the player are two different people.

In my outside-in version, that could be done by specifying the background of the character, and some of the cultural features that come with that. So it would tell you the kind of virtues that kind of person normally has, perhaps without completely setting up their opinions on stuff, unless they added more background elements. But for those who just don't get their character yet, and would prefer to fall into a groove over time, well they could just start with nothing and build up a reputation. Hopefully reflecting their actions back at them would help them explore things they hadn't considered.
Having said that, I'm quite keen on the idea of tying power during character creation into backgrounds, so that a player will have stuff to play off from the start, as it comes with what he is interested in doing. I'm not sure how well that would fit into a stricter system though.

Quote from: JoyWriter on April 22, 2009, 11:56:32 AM
So I hope you can see, I'm not suggesting that we remove explicit, designed, system from the equation, just that we put it on the outside of player character decisions, influencing but not fully determining them, as a "roll to see what you decide" system would. The point I was trying to make is that this form of control can be just as specific in it's in-character results as the rolled system, but hopefully more player friendly.

Which is something of a straw man argument, because at no point did anyone argue for that; GW's proposition specifically contained the caveat that the player can overule the character.

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The same consequences you mention, and I see the problem, occur when dealing with life and death combat; we had one player once run off into a dangerous area, and almost cause TPK. You're dead right about indirect consequences, I didn't consider that. The thing is, we except that someone may cause problems for the group in a combat situation, why not in a social situation too? Can't we use the same methods to deal with both?

The difference between the two is that in physical combat you know that you are in a fight, and know this when it begins.  The thing that makes social issues different is that they are pervasive and invisible, and if you don't already know what to expect you may find yourself locked into something before you even knew the issue had arisen.  Thus, it is something that benefits from being articulated as a mechanical system even more than depictions of physical interaction do.   Even if you try to go the laborious-GM-explanation-plus-trial-and-error, there is no guarantee that players will necessarily learn the right rule.  It seems to me more useful, in terms of outcomes, and more fair, in terms of expactations, to make the thing as explicit and functional as possible.

Quote from: contracycle on April 23, 2009, 05:40:23 AM

Quote from: JoyWriter on April 22, 2009, 11:56:32 AM
So I hope you can see, I'm not suggesting that we remove explicit, designed, system from the equation, just that we put it on the outside of player character decisions, influencing but not fully determining them, as a "roll to see what you decide" system would. The point I was trying to make is that this form of control can be just as specific in it's in-character results as the rolled system, but hopefully more player friendly.

Which is something of a straw man argument, because at no point did anyone argue for that; GW's proposition specifically contained the caveat that the player can overule the character.

Seriously? Then I've been creating some obscure design challenge for myself then! Well in that case there are pre-existing incentive type methods that should do the job just as well. I still like the idea I came up with though. Perhaps I could exaggerate the feature you mentioned, the "stranger in a strange land" one, and make a game specifically about teaching separate character identity. Could be cool, providing it ramps up "social difficulty" slowly. Anyway, I thought that that game example was an expression of the design intent I mentioned and was trying to find something to fit it, if it doesn't fit it doesn't fit!

Quote from: contracycle on April 23, 2009, 05:40:23 AM

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The same consequences you mention, and I see the problem, occur when dealing with life and death combat; we had one player once run off into a dangerous area, and almost cause TPK. You're dead right about indirect consequences, I didn't consider that. The thing is, we except that someone may cause problems for the group in a combat situation, why not in a social situation too? Can't we use the same methods to deal with both?

The difference between the two is that in physical combat you know that you are in a fight, and know this when it begins.  The thing that makes social issues different is that they are pervasive and invisible, and if you don't already know what to expect you may find yourself locked into something before you even knew the issue had arisen.  Thus, it is something that benefits from being articulated as a mechanical system even more than depictions of physical interaction do.   Even if you try to go the laborious-GM-explanation-plus-trial-and-error, there is no guarantee that players will necessarily learn the right rule.  It seems to me more useful, in terms of outcomes, and more fair, in terms of expactations, to make the thing as explicit and functional as possible.

Fair point. I imagine that that the same criticism applies to pure dungeon crawl rpgs; the only way to take a break from complex challenges is to take a break from the game! I wonder if there is a way to make breather sections, where people can rest their social skills? Actually, perhaps the dungeon itself provides the clue; the only way to take a break from the town is to enter the wilderness, the only way to take a break from the wilderness is to enter the town, that kind of idea.
But there is a big difference in that the existence of any kind of party structure brings society with you, and so presumably the social mechanics, unless the reaction component is restricted to NPCs (which is a distortion of consistency that I don't like much, but is inevitable given the freedom of players I assumed). To be honest by inclination I would rather make such a system magic based, so that it follows the characters around, and use it as a feature of how the game plays.

There is also the problem of hidden social/identity traps, which would be situations that effect their moral standing without the player realising: Traps of some form can be inevitable whenever there is hidden information, so actually the reputation/identity system would not be as susceptible to this as offending people would be. The reason for this is that there should be quite a bit of feedback as I said before there is quite a lot of leeway before a complex character becomes effectively insane. You can build up little impressions about how they behave, perhaps using a fuzzy set approach; where they slowly increase their membership of the "principled" club. This is the scrappy game-version of Bayesian case-reasoning, where you compare an unknown situation to one you already recognise, and base your reactions on that. It's like having WOD's morality system, but instead of x levels, you have membership of the two extremes, and the more strongly you fit either decides peoples opinion of you, and in more multi-polar systems the more you strongly fit two "conflicting" categories is the degree to which people consider you contradictory. That's a simplistic version, and more subtlety could happen, such as creating a new case just for them because of how they mix two cases, but even then you'd draw the line at a certain level of tweaking to stop recording concerns getting out of hand, or making it another obscure minigame like "confuse the 20 questions machine"!
Honestly, there's loads you can do on this subject, I've barely scratched the surface. The rules could be both rigorous and flexible, although the combination naturally produces complexity, but particularly with encounter design, I think you could use rules like this to "reveal" characters from uncooperative play in quite a satisfying way!

I'm beginning to like the idea of a case-based system that explicitly records the revealed "nature" of the PC on their sheet, so they know when they tripped a thematic trap, but I can see less-recorded alternatives working providing NPC reactions are frequent and integrated.

Tell you what, if you don't want to work on this Contracycle, or if it doesn't fit your criteria GomeWorks, then I'll just pop it in my back pocket and bring it up a few years from now as a crunchy identity based rpg of it's own, but if you want to keep talking to me about it, feel free.