[BARBAREN!] Reward and Advancement

[Frank T]

This is a thread about my project BARBAREN!, a none-too-serious game about mighty Barbarians fucking and butchering their way through life. See my signature for the link to the original post with the rules' translation from German.

So I have started to actually write the book. I'm still desperate to get some more playtests, but the first playtest already revealed a lot. The game works the way I wanted it to in most parts. However, one problem arose: The two player characters advanced at a very different speed, opening a significant gap between their effectiveness in combat and wooing after only four sessions. I'll quote the important parts of the rules' translation:

4.3 Aggression
You can use Aggression in combat to gain an additional 1d6. This can be declared after all other dice have been rolled. Only one point of Aggression per roll can be spent, except when trying to recover from a critical wound.

You can also use Aggression to increase your other fighting stat base values, at the cost of 3 points per Combat point or, for Momentum and Elegance, the current rating times 2.

Aggression is gained through
--> Secret Observation. Add 1 if the warrior secretly watches a woman undress. 2 points if he watches her having sex.
--> Sex: Add 1 point every time the warrior has sex. Add 3 if it's somehow new and different. With a different woman, in a different place, etc. Double the points if it's an orgy. Add an additional 3 if the woman belongs to another warrior.
--> Rejection: Add 2 points if the warrior fails in wooing for a woman.
--> Class Females: There are some women considered... oh well, now my dictionary fails me. How do you translate "echt geile Sau" into English? I'll stick with Real Hot Bitch, though that's not nearly it. Anyhow, further information later. Screwing a Real Hot Bitch for the first time grants an extra 3 points. And then there are these rare women considered Goddesses. Screwing a Goddess for the first time grants an extra 6 points. Secret Observation of a Goddess also grants double points.

(...)

4.5 Horny
Your Horny score corresponds to your Aggression. You can spent it to gain additional dice in wooing or use it to increase wooing stats much the same way as with Aggression (see above).

Horny is gained through
--> Peril: Spending some grueling days in the wilderness gains you 1 point. 1 extra point each if you fed yourself and if you faced devastating weather.
--> Hunting Success: If you kill a beast and eat its raw heart or testicle, add 1 for a boar, dear, elk etc., 2 for a puma, lynx or wolf, 3 for a grizzly or tiger, and 10 for a dragon.
--> Fighting: Any fight is worth 1 point, 3 if you lost at least 75% of your Combat score. Double points if you killed or critically injured a foe.
--> Being Wounded: Add 2 for being wounded in combat (only if all your old wounds had healed before). Add an additional 2 for every deep wound.
--> Triumph: Defeating an Equal foe in duel gains 3 points. Defeating a Mighty foe together with others also 3 points. Defeating a Mighty foe in duel or a Towering foe together with others gains 6 points. See further below for the meaning of Equal, Mighty and Towering.

Now, let me go back and explain the meaning of the involved stats:

Combat and Attractiveness are ressource pools used for combat and wooing respectively. They start at a base value of about 20, as derived from the character's attributes, and are spent on attacks / advances. The number of dice to be used in a given roll is the number of points spent +1 d6, to a maximum of 5 for attack and 6 for defence.

Momentum, Elegance, Charm and Touch are more ressources, to be used for special moves etc. (see Crunch, the). They start at 1-4, also derived from attributes.

At the core of the game's interplay mechanic are Aggression and Horny, as explained above. Now, in our playtest, the characters faced similar situations, but one player rolled significantly better than the other. By application of the above rules, this resulted in several effects:

- Player two, who rolled worse, spent more Aggression and Horny on gaining additional dice, to be lost without benefit.

- Character one succeeded in his fights and wooings, which meant he gained a lot more reward, due to sheer luck.

- Character one, as a consequence, was at 32 combat / 31 attraction after 4 sessions, character two at 27 / 26, meaning character one would, in average, last one or two rounds longer in a fight, which is a great deal. Character two would now stand little chance were they to fight each other. Momentum & Co. were about at the same level, with slight advantages for character one also.
_________

I'm musing about the best way to ballance this out. One idea would be to make the cost for raising combat and attractiveness progressive, so you would have to spend 2 points to raise from 21 to 22, three points from 30 to 31, four points for 49 to 50, etc. But that probably won't be enough.

Another idea would be to change the way points are awarded, raising the base reward for being in a fight or wooing in the first place, and reduce the bonus for success.

A different approach was discarded earlier on: What if you raise your stats not with unspent Aggression / Horny, but with spent Aggression / Horny? That would be backed up by a rule that you have to spend at least x points in a fight / wooing. I'm still not overly convinced by this, but it would solve the problem of one player spending all the good points on short notice.

A more radical solution to that last problem would be leaving that whole possibility out entirely. Yet it provides a nice "emergency brake" that did a good job in the playtests, so I don't really want to cancel it.

What do you think about this? Any other suggestions?

- Frank

[KingstonC]

Tie Agression/Horny point gain into attempting risky acts, not succeding at them. If a player tries to do somthing that matches their character concept, give them points. If they try to do somthing risky that maches their character concept, give them more points. Do this weather or not they succede. Thus, players are rewarded for adressing premise/ character concept, rather than being lucky.

Also, the word "horny" in english describes the desire to have sex, but the "horny" pool in your game is a measure of how sexually desirable the character is, not how much the character wants to have sex.  A more accurate name would be "hot"  or "desirable" or "manly". The last would tie into the self concously goofy male power fantacy element of the game.

[TonyLB]

God, I cannot find a diplomatic way to comment on whether "Horny" is more applicable than "Manly."  It's not just me, is it?  Anyway, feet-first into the wonderful wrongness of it all.

"Virile" is also a word that gets bandied around a lot in what I conceive of (perhaps incorrectly) as the genre source material.  But I think there's a serious case for Horny.  Yes, saying "This is how horny your character is" does not necessarily imply "This is how willing other people will be to have sex with your character."  But if that's what happens in this game world then that's a powerful (and delightfully, horribly, terribly WRONG) statement about the way that world works.

I'm in agreement with Kingston's idea that you shouldn't penalize characters in Aggression for (say) trying to eviscerate the Sultan, only to have their character beaten savagely and throne into the Salt Mines.  That should make them more aggressive.  Likewise, being rebuffed by a female should make them more Horny.

But you could penalize the other stat.  Being thrown into the Salt Mines could totally be worth a penalty to Horny.  And being rebuffed by a woman could penalize your Aggression.  That way you get the Horny Bonus (say) by trying to seduce a bar-maid, but then have to follow through (or risk losing some of your aggression).

Anyway, just a thought.

Am I the only one who thinks that, by putting these ludicrously male elements explicitly out onto the table, this game could succeed in attracting female gamers?  Just another passing thought.

[Stefan / 1of3]

Translation is always a problem. The German word "geil" means "horny", "sexy" or simply "great" in a general sense.


@Tony:

Your suggestions make sense, indeed.


As for the female gamers:
Franks game has already aquired some fans at www.grofafo.org, but only one of six gamers who registered for a test play at the next meeting is female. Although perhaps some girls would only do this, if there are no guys present.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Horny is, of course, better than manly, as it depicts the motivation of the character, just as aggression does. You could call them bloodlust and cuntlust, respectively, if you wanted. Then again, that's not the question under advicement, especially as the primary version of the game is in German.

For the question at hand: Tony's idea is worthy of consideration, even if it doesn't exactly correct the problem. Interestingly, the problem you have here is also evident in Heroquest, except that our Heroquest guru Mike Holmes doesn't consider it a problem at all. As I understand it, that's because in HQ choosing to lose a conflict is a reasonable choice, so you don't have to use your resources for winning if you don't want to. Here it seems that the player doesn't have the option of losing gracefully, without losing resources as well. So consider that for starters: make it so that losing is an interesting plot complication, one you might want to take, and one that doesn't weaken your resources. So, after rolling for gutting the Sultan, you can either accede to being thrown to the salt mines OR spend aggressiveness to succeed, after all. This way the spending happens only if the player thinks that it's worth it, in which case it's always his own problem if he's weaker than others in the long run. I'm sure Mike can explain this better, if you ask him.

I myself don't however get excited over the above solution, so the way I'd do it is to scrap the points approach and make those pools Aggression dice and Lust dice. They're worth one die per point, anyway, right? Then, I'd change the advancement so that you can roll your Aggression pool to raise those fighting stats and Horny pool for wooing stats at certain points of the game (end of session, after killing the Advancement Goblin, whatever), and if you roll over the current value, the trait rises. This way trait improvement is just as random as combat; spending pools won't ultimately slow your progress, and everybody can still sacrifice their pools. To make it really nasty, I'd also make gaining pools a matter of die rolls: having sex gives you X+modifiers dice, which you get to roll against your current pool value, and the pool only rises if you beat the current value. This way the barbarian needs to push the envelope to improve at all with time, and there's enough die rolling to statistically even good and bad rolls for everybody.

For added fun, combine the above ideas.

--

Generally, this kind of fiddling is pretty easy to do. Just put in enough of random variation and some correlation, and nobody can tell if differences in improvement are due to better play or better luck. It's all in BRP system, if you look carefully.

[Frank T]

Thanks everybody! For the horny part, yeah, that's not an optimized translation. I'll get back to this issue if I ever do a translation for actually publishing in English.

Tony and Kingston, I think you probably nailed it (no pun intended). At least the better part of the points should be awarded for taking the risk, not for rolling well. I think I find it nice to still maintain a little reward for success, since the game is about winning after all. So, Eero, the HQ way is not really an option. I like your juggling with the numbers and dice, though I think it just might be a little too much, and statistical chances won't necessarily help if a player is just one unlucky bastard.

As for girls liking the game: Someone, I think it was Caynreth, pointed out that this is a game for girls. You see, men just lack the role models these days to play a real macho. Everywhere they are expected to be nice and caring. To have these wimps play Barbarians is like having real doctors in a hospital show. Crap. ;o)

- Frank

[Resonantg]

No offense, and I may be the oddity here, but this just mortifies me, and I'm male.  I can't see how this game could attract female gamers, since even I'm repelled by the base concept I've read.  But like I said, I may be the oddity here.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Of course it's appalling. But! So is "let's go kill everyone we meet who is of races determined to be uniformly evil, so we can take their stuff" (D&D), as is "let's injure, kill, and terrorize others to prolong our own superior existences" (Vampire). (And vampirism tends to serve as a veiled/metaphoric form of rape -- rape, by the way, being explicitly disallowed by the rules of Barbaren last I checked). A lot of this hobby -- and popular films, comics, books -- is about imagining all sorts of (to put it mildly) anti-social activities. The thing about Barbaren (as with Kill Puppies for Satan) is that it says pretty explicitly, "we have these appalling desires, let's work 'em out safely, but y'know, don't kid yourself, this is barbaric."

And if someone wants to slam me for what I just said, it's absolutely your right, but maybe we should start a new thread somewhere, because I've already hijacked Frank's enough, I think.

As for Frank's actual question: Yes, by all means, reward players for trying interesting stuff, whether or not it succeeds. That way you'll have less of players sitting around calculating (how unbarbaric!) and more headlong plunging into neat stuff.

[TonyLB]

I think that women could get into the role more completely because there would be no risk of people feeling that they were playing out their own real, hidden, desires by way of their character.  It's so foreign that you're utterly free to revel in the wrongness without feeling tainted.

For instance, I know women who I suspect would get a kick out of delivering the following line with utter gusto:  "Come, wench!  The burning seed of my lust requires release!  Make your comely form the vessel of my rippling thews!"  I know no men who I think could deliver that line without going utterly red in the face with mortification (myself most definitely included).

You know what, though?  I'm totally going to have to play this game when it comes out.  Because the embarrassed giggles I'm getting even typing these quotes are making my ribs hurt, and that's worth the mortification.

[Frank T]

On the appalling issue. Of course it's my job as an author to get across very plainly the satire aspect of it all. As sense of humor varies, not everyone will laugh at it. But appalling? It's the first time I hear it termed that. Maybe it's a different sensitivity in the US than in Germany after all. I think it's no more than a harmless joke. Of course everybody is free to not like it. But I don't think it needs to appall anyone, for it is too obviously ridiculous.

Well, that's just the way I see it. I don't want to take this thread off topic, so please let's close that issue now.

- Frank