[Softlands] Question about Core Mechanic

[VoiceOfGd]

Ok, this is my first post here and I have forum stagefright so I'm going to go directly down Ron's list in "How to present a mechanic..." explicitly.  Sorry for being cliche or something... Yeah...

            Softlands is my first serious attempt at a system meant to be played in my absense.  It is unclear how much farther it will go than my friends playing it with there friends, but I'd *like* to make a bit of money off of it.  At minimum it will be posted on the internet for the convenience of my friends and anybody else who feels like playing.  So:

           1.  The game is my take on the creation of legends and mythology and the forces that drive it, specifically ideas of scarcity and unspecified detail.  Its about security versus flexability, about the need to explain verses the feeling that anything is possible.

          2.  The setting has those themes built into the metaphysics.  There are large amounts of terrain that is simply unspecified.  The world is not finished and the gods require sacrifices to maintain and complete it.  The major conflicts are over what the world will be like when completed or even whether to complete it at all.  Most importantly, the gaps in reality are filled by people creating legends, that tend to come true.  Players take the role of people who for whatever reason become conscious of this fact and deliberately walk into their own legends in order to accomplish something otherwise impossible.

          3.  Character creation is done in a lifepath sort of way with inborn attributes decided before learned ones.  However, the process is controlled at the highest level by the allocation of Destiny Points that represent unlikeliness and uncommonness of a character.  The amount one gets at character creation is determined by the scale of starting conflicts in the game.  The two main resolution mechanics are the the plot roll and the conflict roll.  The plot roll represents the power of stories over a legendary character's life.  It determines which story's effects pulls the character back into prominance when the character is not being actively involved.  It is a weighted random choice between stories simply.  The conflict roll will be described in more detail after the summery because my question relates to it.  It is not entirely a fortune mechanic but cointains fortune.

         4.  Effectiveness improvement happens two ways, only one of which is really a reward mechanic.  Most stories that one can get into emphasize some sort of a ability.  As such stories become prevalent the ability increases.  There is a cost however, in that the story's adversity follows the person around in plot rolls and can often warps one's personality.  The example is a story about tricking one's way out of the captivity of a talking mountain lion say.  The effect of the story is to make one trickier but also have a disproportionate chance of being captured by things that could be escaped by trickery.  Or just to meet lots of talking animals.  Or to have difficulty telling the truth.  The other way to improve is a player called for scale escalation that increases the scope of the conflicts and gives the appropriate amount more destiny points.  Effectiveness is lost through injuries and similar problems incurred in the conflict resolution system, or by the negative implications of stories.  Players cannot die before the end of the game.  There is an endgame system that will not be discussed here yet.

           The Conflict Roll: Participants in a conflict (including inanimate objects played by the GM) declare rough *outcomes* for the conflict in which they are the decisive factor and are totally sucessful.  They receive a number of dice based on the skill they wish to succeed using.  They may declare a number of complications or sacrifices to get extra dice.  Skills may be 0 or negative in which case the player must bid complications.  All pariticipants roll their dice, which can be of any number of sides as long as they are the same.  Highest single die wins ties are rerolled as often as neccisary, and that player narrates the details of their determined result.  They are encouraged to consider how close others came and their results relative to each other.  Any player can replace something that happens to their character by something at least as likely in the opinion of the GM or of all players as well as at least as bad subject only to unanimous disagreement by the other players and GM.

          This has worked decently in playtests.  However, players want some amount of power over the bids of NPCs and especially inanimate objects, based on wanting to risk a bit less (e.g. opponents victory means I run away).  This seems reasonable, but it breaks the system if it is unlimited, because somebody controlling both sides of the bidding can horirbly skew the roll or make it unneccisary.  It takes away the feeling of finite resources.  The game is emphatically not gamist, but it loses some atmosphere if a player has to give up an advantage.  I'd like to have some sort of metagame reasource that one must spend to force a bid up, but this feels sort of convoluted.  Any advice on this question?

[Shreyas Sampat]

This is very interesting.

I'll point out to you that you have a more or less obvious mechanic already that you can coopt - in addition to complications on themselves, players are allowed to narrate (perhaps only for NPCs, etc.) "concessions." A concession costs the player a die, and it essentially reduces the final successfulness of the opponent's win (If the opponent gets a complete success, and you narrated two concessions, he gets whatever a complete success -2 dice is.) Alternatively concessions can simply reduce the opponent's die pool, but I suspect that approach will end in tears.

I hve some other thoughts brewing on this, but I'll let them stew for now.

[Mike Holmes]

However, players want some amount of power over the bids of NPCs and especially inanimate objects, based on wanting to risk a bit less (e.g. opponents victory means I run away). This seems reasonable, but it breaks the system if it is unlimited, because somebody controlling both sides of the bidding can horirbly skew the roll or make it unneccisary.

Would it work to have a player appoint another player as the "opposition controller" for each contest? So, if I want to go against Bob the Destroyer, I have to appoint you or another player as Bob's controller for the duration. Would that work?

Mike

[VoiceOfGd]

Shreyas, I've thought about that some and while it seems to be very workable for the low end of skill values I use at the high end, one still often has the ability to crush the enemies result.  I suppose the converse of that is that there is little reward for taking concessions.  Should the dice costs and bonuses just increase with higher skill?

Mike, the opposition controller doesn't really solve the problem, which was to give the player some ability to protect themself from a particularly nasty opponent victory condition.  While, I suppose the average rpg player trusts a fellow player more on that regard than their GM, it seems more likely to cause a conflict of interest, given that most PCs care about most conflict.  (Thus far it has been relatively successfully playtested as a quasi party based game.)

[Shreyas Sampat]

Here's a more radical idea:
Dictating X concessions requires you to divide your dice pool by X+1. (You probably want to put some limit on this like, "You can only reduce a die pool if it ends up bigger than the other pool, but you can always dictate one concession.")

I think that this will probably encourage concession use at extremes of skill discrepancy, which is what it sounds like you wanted.

You could also have a flat-out rule against "particularly nasty opponent victory conditions"; in Torchbearer, for instance, you cannot remove an entity from involvement in a scene (by killing him, sending it home, knocking her unconscious...) except by its owner's explicit choice to permit it.

[Jonathan Walton]

Hey Voice,

Welcome to the Forge!  Are you comfortable using your real name here?  It makes things much more chummy and eases communication.

Nobody's said anything about your setting yet, but I just wanted to say that it immediately caught my attention (in a way that a small number of Indie Game Design threads do).  I'm really excited about the idea of an unfinished world that the gods haven't gotten around to making "solid."  It's a very interesting variation on the kind of "changeable reality" that you see in properties like Mage or The Matrix or Dark City or any number of dream-based games.

I guess I'm wondering how far you want to push the setting into the mechanics.  Some of the best games, in my opinion, tend to tie everything together so the mechanics support the setting and vice versa.  Taking your premise, I could see many possible options for resolving the narration issues.  After all, if the world isn't solid, might it be possible that players could potentially re-narrate particular portions of the game that didn't happen in a satisfying way?  You could have some sort of mechanic that described how invested players were in a particular outcome and then, if people really wanted to push for something they wanted, they'd be able to overwrite something that happened.

I've actually been off-and-on pondering a PBeM roleplaying game where players would constantly be re-writing the same scenes, creating variations on the themes and circumstances that occured.  I could see something similar working in your game, if the substance of objects, people, and events is not solidly fixed.

So, I guess I'm coming at it from the opposite direction.  Before you try to make something work mechanically, maybe you should find out what you want the mechanic to do thematically.

[VoiceOfGd]

I think I'll try out the division thing next session of playtest.  It sounds workable so far with the limits you gave.  Alternatively I'm thinking I could just limit forced concessions to 1 per player.  That ought to cover most problems.  I think I'll have to test out each first.

In terms of non-solidness.  I already have some level of "change the past" style mechanics, in that the effects of the past can be changed to more like the effects of a legend about them.  This is certainly a recourse, but it must contend with the inertial effect the characters memeories and beliefs.  I do not allow the mutable of the world to penetrate that far into peoples minds, because to do so would just make the story become totally true instead of preserving tention between what the world thinks and what you remember.  You have to know the freedom you are giving up.

So the core mechanic is there to cover situations "hardened" by the presence of consciousness, but the story/reward system allows the long term softness of the world to take effect.

[Jonathan Walton]

Cool.  I'm digging your cosmology.  Echos of Continuum ("Information is all") and Nobilis (where the past can be changed but is often preserved in the memories of the Nobilis), mixed with a somewhat Judeo-Christian idea of god(s) and mortals (in traditional mysticism and occult practices) exerting their will on chaos.  Also a little bit like Mage/Changeling in a "gets harder to change things with more people there exerting their expectations on it" sort of way.  I'm actually in the middle of writing a paper about the difference between history and myth, so these sorts of issues seem especially relevant.

So, does everyone know that the past has been changed?  Or just the PCs? Or just the person who enacted the change?  If everyone knows, it seems silly to even change it.  If the PCs are some type of super-people, who notice when the past gets changed, I guess that makes sense.  But, in some ways I like option 3, because then the past could be constantly changing without people really noticing, unless they do it themselves.  However, it might cause issues when one character wants to change the past without the other characters knowing, since it would lead to erasing PC memories and that's not completely satisfying.  In any case, I'm interested to know how you decided to deal with things.

I'd also be interested in your plot roll mechanics, if you'd be willing to share those too.

[VoiceOfGd]

Its sort of a mix of all three actually.  Everybody that knew it was a certain way before by direct experience instead of word of mouth or physical evidence, keeps those memories at first.  But memory is mutable and the weight of evidence eventually convinces people if there are but few witnesses.  Too many witnesses and the change will revert.  Hense, the low population of the world is related to its softness.  On the other hand the PCs are of the priviliged few that know that such things are possible.  Therefore they retain their memories in most cases because they realize what is going on.  However, complete immunity only exists for the one making the change, because only they really know for sure that yes, they did that and it was different before.