All about the Ordeals? Seeking advise on game design.

[Albert the Absentminded]

Hi. I'm Albert, and while I've lurked here occasionally, this is my first post.

I've been mulling over ideas for a game system I want to put together, and I thought I'd come to get advice on some aspects I've been considering. First, some intro to what the system is going to be:

The core rules are stolen from Ars Magica 4th, although I've been making mods here and there. There will be Stats(Strength, Stamina, etc.), there will be Abilities(divided into Skills, Talents, and Knowledges), rolls will be Stat + Ability + dice roll(an exploding d6 rather than a d10, however). Etc.

Combat will be emphasized, but one of the things about it that will be emphasized is that it is bloody dangerous to get into unless you're an uber-leet combat badass. In other words, the last resort of the incompetent, but an option the competent will keep in mind.

The potential of a particular starting character will be determined by 2 things: Age, and where you fall on a linear scale. Zero-point characters are 'average' characters for their age, while a -5 character is going to be rather disadvantaged, and a +5 character will be rather leet. Training as a Knight, Ninja, Magus, etc., is represented by more points - a powerful old Archmage would be done at character creation by taking a 150 year old character and adding 100(or more) points, while a newly sworn Knight might be an 18-year-old whose additional schooling is represented by 10 to 20 points.


Anyway, back to my question. I swiped the idea of Ordeals from Ars Magica's The Mysteries. As I've been thinking about it, I've seriously considered making nearly every form of advancement in the game a matter of going through various Ordeals to gain advantages.

Forex, trying to do three things simultaneously in combat would cause lots of penalties - unless you've gained the advantages that eliminate those penalties. Getting hit in combat will hurt, unless you have the advantages that reduce pain(by going berzerk, by going numb, by being able to ignore pain, etc.). Fancy moves would be mastered by going through and Ordeal.

Magical powers can be gained through ordeals. Most traditions would have a gateway ordeal - suceeding at it makes the paradigm of the magical tradition easier to learn, but makes magic outside the paradigm harder to learn.

Anyway, advantages would have ratings going from 1 to 10, or higher. Each Ordeal would provide the chance at one or more Ordeal points.  You would have to accumulate Ordeal points equal to the expanded triangular value of the advantage to earn it(1 for 1, 3 for 2, 6 for 3, etc.), and you would have to accumulate a number of Ordeal points from a single Ordeal equal to the rating of the advantage in order for everything to fall in place.

L1 advantages would be easy to gain, because L1 Ordeals are fairly easy to accomplish. L5 or L6 Ordeals would have a significant chance of killing someone attempting one, meaning that higher-level advantages are hard to get.

Going through an Ordeal would give you a number of Ordeal Checks equal to the rating of the Ordeal. Each successful check would provide an Ordeal point for gaining an advantage.

Ordeals could be formal, such as the Three Days Darkness test administered by the Brotherhood of the Valiant Drake when a member seeks to master the Quicksilver-Dragon Armor Technique; or informal, such as when Charles Talbot, The Hammer of Anarchia, learns to divorce himself from pain and fatigue, during the Battle of Varang Crossing.


My apologies for the rambling nature of this post. Any comments or criticisms?

-Albert

[Jasper]

Hi Albert,

Pretty sketchy so far...the idea of the ordeals sounds fine to me but it's hard to comment without a larger context.  Perennial question: what do the players actually do in the game?  What do character do?  You have ninjas and such, and we know there will be combat and magic both -- presumably its fantasy, being based on AM -- but how is different from other fantasy games?  What, in short, is your goal for it?

[Albert the Absentminded]

I'm thinking of a structure where the world is filled with three basic types of critters:

Protagonists - the "adventurers" of the game. Characters controlled by the players who are all linked(albeit sometimes loosely linked) together in some way. An AM-style Covenant might be a way of handling a protagonist group where the most powerful protagonists are wizards. Each player would have control over several protagonists of varying power, normally playing no more than 1-2 in any given scenario.

Antagonists - Important characters controlled by the players who aren't linked to the Protagonists by bonds of fellowship. They exist - from a narrative point of view - to cause trouble to the Protagonists. Development will be probably sketchier than for Protagonists, simply because these guys tend to operate on their own, and RPing an Antagonist means less face-time for the other players. Normally, you don't run both an Antagonist and a Protagonist at the same time, although people who don't let gamist tendancies overwhelm their sense of fairness probably could.

Extras - Everyone else in the world. Extras aren't necessarily weak - a dragon who isn't interacting with the protagonists is an Extra - they're just in the background. Yes, Extras can be changed to Antagonists, or even Protagonists. Minions of Antagonists are often Extras, especially if contact is intermittant with the Antagonist. One of the features of Extras is that you can usually interact socially with them by rolling the dice.


Each session, someone should be appointed the referee, to run the Extras, assign or run minor Antagonists(in a newly contacted village, there might be as many as 3-4 individuals who should be played as Antagonists), interpret rules as needed, etc. Unless the individual picked to be the ref is scrupulously honest and even-handed, he probably shouldn't run a major Protagonist while reffing.


Time scale is intended to be pretty long - a campaign needs to be able to keep going for decades, perhaps centuries.

Note: None of this precludes DnD-style dungeon-delving. One player can certainly be given only Antagonists to run and always be assigned ref duties. Of course, as I mentioned above, combat will be pretty dangerous. Still, it's a quick source of informal ordeals.


The macro-goal is to create a situation where the players are actively involved in the world by having them define the villains.

The rules-goal is to simultaneously get within (your choice of shouting, pissing, or spitting) distance of modeling reality - without slowing the game to a crawl - while tying significant character advancement to going through the refiner's fire.

-Albert

[Jasper]

Hi Albert,

You've layed out a lot of larger structure for your game, including player roles and some meta-game influence (player definition of villains).  This is great, but I still don't get a sense of what play's actually supposed to be like.

Note: None of this precludes DnD-style dungeon-delving.

But does it encourage it?  What other possibilities are there?  Are you envisioning ninjas and other typical fantasy-class characters running around killing things...or AM-style covenants doing political intriqgue and advancing their own goals...or something else?  

The rules-goal is to simultaneously get within (your choice of shouting, pissing, or spitting) distance of modeling reality - without slowing the game to a crawl...

Well most games try to "model reality" to some extent or another -- after-all they have characters in them that are basically human, have physical objects, etc.  But do you mean that you want to have a game that pays a lot of attention to realistic physics?  Something like GURPS maybe?  If so, why?  You have a game about magic...maybe you should emphasize that aspect of (your game's) reality.  

...while tying significant character advancement to going through the refiner's fire.

To what end?  Just as a reward for the players?  Sounding a lot like D&D to me.  What does D&D not do that you want to do?


Cheers

[Albert the Absentminded]

Well, this started out as a thought of "I want Ars Magica to be better". Ultimately, I realized I was turning it into a whole new game.

I want to ecourage a sprawling epic feel - a group of Protagonists off pillaging lands considered valid targets for gold and glory, another group tying the local noblity up in sociopolitical knots, a lone questor seeking to understand the Fourth Meditation of Pefection, a Sargeant Whatsisname trying to get the militia of a strategically important village up to par, some stay-at-home types trying to keep the locals from descending into soap-opera, etc.


Every Ability will have various actions associated with them, with difficulties and modifiers. I'm thinking the full write-up of each Ability will be at least 2 pages long, although short-cut quick-reference sheets will be provided.


Along with Wind and Blood, I'm thinking of including Willpower as a Vitals meter. With Blood, go too low and you die. With Wind, go too low and you lack the energy to move. With Willpower, go too low and you are mentally exhausted(er, I need a better name), have a hard time caring about anything, etc. Extras will typically give in if you deplete their Willpower meters by a bit(one decent 'attack' is probably enough), because they don't have a personal stake in the situation (arguing with them about something they _do_ care about is a great way to turn them into Antagonists).


I say I want to model reality because I don't see too many systems doing it. DnD does a piss-poor job, as does the BPS. White Wolf isn't much better, nor is Unisystem. And the 'genre' games I have read place simulationism far behind narrativism in importance. I'm hoping that a stronger simulationist framework will reduce the tendancy towards gamist munchkinism and/or narrativist snobbery.


Advancement is about going through the refiner's fire because I want to play with the idea. Having skills isn't good enough. The veteran warrior _will_ kick the ass of the highly-trained-but-green prince in a fair fight, even if the prince's form(his Sword Ability) is slightly more perfect. I want the guys that go out and do stuff to get advantages that training can't replicate.

Note that going through the refiner's fire refers to any sort of power. The guy who manages to keep a delicate alliance functioning in the face of scandal and greater potential scandal has earned a little something, don't you think?

Oh, and I want a thousand-and-one different magic systems. And in the case of a broad magic system like Ars Magica's Hermetic magic, I want there to be so much development stuff that no one can hope to learn even a small portion of it.

[Jasper]

Hi Albert,

I have some overall thoughts, but I'll try to comment on some specifics first.  There may be some hard-ish questions to follow.  I don't (of course) mean to be discouraging, but these are things you need to think about.

I want to ecourage a sprawling epic feel....

This is fine but something nearly every fantasy game says it wants to do.  What specific rules (including but not limited to mechanics) have you imagined to do this encouragement?  Assembling a whole lot of rules of familiar fare, or even of new fare, without a conscious mind towards accomplishing this sort of thing will generally not get it done -- only by very capricious luck.  In fact, I think "mood" is probably one of the hardest things to encourage through rules.  Describing to players what you think the mood should be is far easier -- though of course doing both is a lot more powerful.  

Every Ability will have various actions associated with them, with difficulties and modifiers.  I'm thinking the full write-up of each Ability will be at least 2 pages long, although short-cut quick-reference sheets will be provided.

Abilities with difficulties and modifiers...most RPGs do it this way, so no problems here.  Any thoughts beyond that?  What kind of abilities, in terms of scale for instance?  You want to convey an epic feel.  I might suggest not including "mundane" abilities, or lumping them together.  Separate out all the potential "epic" abilities so there are a lot of them.  Detail creates focus after all.

I think it's too early to be worrying about how long your write-ups will be.  They'll be as long as they need to be.  You'll probably end-up re-writing them several times anyway.

Along with Wind and Blood, I'm thinking of including Willpower as a Vitals meter.

I like this, since you're making a clear distinction between important and non-important people.  Will-power seems a great way to do it mechanically.

I say I want to model reality because I don't see too many systems doing it...the 'genre' games I have read place simulationism far behind narrativism in importance

A big thing to be careful of: simulationism is not the same thing as the simulation of reality; of accuracy; of details, or a lot of other things it is commonly associated with.  Check out Ron's original essay, the Simulationsim essay, and the new glossary.

Presuming that you (personally) prefer simulationism...that's a good thing to know.  However, the value of consciously saying "I'm going to write a simulationist game" has been questioned by some.  It may be better to just write the game and then decide what box to put it in.

Advancement is about going through the refiner's fire because I want to play with the idea. Having skills isn't good enough.... I want the guys that go out and do stuff to get advantages that training can't replicate.

I think the thing you need to consider is how it's going to affect actual play.  Real players aren't going to play stay-at-home knights are they?  So you'll never have to worry about mechanics to actually handle this.  If a player meets an NPC knight who trains like heck but never leaves his castle, just say the knight has poor abilities.

Now I'm not saying that advancement is bad or doesn't have a place in your game.  But you should (a) not put it in just because AR or other games have it, and (b) if you do put it in, have very specific goals you're trying to accomplish by doing so.  This way, you have a criteria for how well the game works -- and it's easy to lose sight of such things in the midst of designing the minutae of mechanics.  If you playtest your game down the line and realize that advancement doesn't produce the effect you wanted, you'll know you need to change it.

The guy who manages to keep a delicate alliance functioning in the face of scandal and greater potential scandal has earned a little something, don't you think?

The character or the player?  I (frankly) don't care whether a character has earned anything -- in fact, since character's aren't people, they can't earn anything in the real world.  Internal causality for character improvement is one thing...a god of "well earned boons" might be another...just keep the players in mind since they're the ones who actually play the game.  Is character advancement the only reward players can recieve?  Of course not.  So the question is whether character advancement is the right reward for your game.


Okay, so those are some specific concerns. Generally, I think you may not be getting my earlier question.  Despite the several kinds of rules you've brought up, I dont' really have a sense of what the game is supposed to play like: that is, what do players do?  That you want it do be epic is the most important thing you've said towards answering this, but that's still very vague.  

What kinds of decisions will players be making?  What city to storm next?  What god to pray to?  In what order to mix the reagents?

How do they interact?  There's a GM, no?  What kinds of jobs does he have, and which do the other players retain?  Who narrates events -- is it the same person in all circumstances?

Those are just two of the biggest and broadest questions...though you don't even have to answer them directly.  If you could write up a brief example of play, in terms of how you imagine the players to be playing, that would help a lot.  I know I'm probably demanding a lot, or seeming overly harsh -- after all, I've started work on games without fully answering the above questions, and plenty of otehr people do too. But how well have those projects gone?  As far as I can tell, if you think of the overall purpose of a game, and how it plays first, before you undertake the bulk of the design work, you've already improved your chances of completing the project -- and completing  a good project -- by at least 50%. (Okay, I made that number up.  But it's a lot.)

I hope that's helpful.

Best,