Reasoning behind dialogue cost

[George Moralidis]

Hello there. I am trying to modify Uni to suit my needs. Just a quick question: what is the reasoning behind spending coins to use dialogue? Have ppl noticed any significant differences in gameplay wneh the free dialogue add-on is used? Thanks

PS: congratulations for the game. it's really well-thought and at the same time very liberating... to say the least.

[Andrew Morris]

Almost any time I've played Universalis, someone has added the "dialog is free" gimmick. I can't say I've noticed a major difference.

[Mike Holmes]

The reasoning is that a character saying something is an event. So you pay for it just like any other event. You could even say it, "My character says X, for one Coin." No different than "My character crosses the street" from that POV, right? In fact, the whole "dialog window" was an incentive in the first place to dialog, as it means that you don't have to pay for each thing said or some such division. In fact, it took us a while to realize that there's a difference between somebody saying something, and that thing being a fact, or revealing the actual existence of a component. Thus it's actually two different things to say, "My character says there's a mountain, and, in fact, there is a mountain." Especially if the character is lying (which can also be established separately, "But there is no mountain." )

Now, what happens is that players like myself only consider these things to be events when they're substantially more than color. That is, I only occasionally pay for dialog anyhow. So I never run into the problem that it's a hinderance. But for people who want to incentivize dialog, there's not much difference, therefore, with putting in the free dialog gimmick.

Mike

[Valamir]

Mike is spot on.

I'll emphasize further the difference between Fact and Color.  If you didn't spend a Coin on it, it isn't a Fact, which means it doesn't get written down and there is no added weight given to it in Challenges.  If two people are chatting and its just a bit of Color, then even without the "Free Dialog" gimmick you don't have to pay for it, any more than you have to pay for anything thats mere Color.

But if the fact that they've talked is important to write down (i.e. "Brian confessed to Jim that he had indeed killed Gail") then its a Fact and it should be paid for exactly as for any other fact (i.e. Gail was Killed by Brian)

[George Moralidis]

Thank you all for answering. (Talking directly to the game's creators is something i'll have to get used to. Usually players aren't so lucky :-D )

Perhaps for some situations, it would be useful to introduce bluffing somehow. (so that the other players are not sure whether the "bluffer" used a coin to turn words into a Fact, or not)

maybe when a pirate says: "this map leads to the treasure" is one such occasion. Or not. Maybe you would use the "enigma" add-on to resolve this kind of situation.

Don't worry about that though. i haven't given much thought to it. But maybe it will get someone's creative juices flowing. With this game you never know. :-)

[CPXB]

George,

The way my group handles that is we rarely spend coins to make dialog facts.  In the current game I'm in, f'rex, "Earth is considered to be a myth" as a fact.  Some of the characters may be on earth, or at least orbiting around it, and certainly some of the characters believe that the planet is earth and have said so in dialog.  Whether or not it is a fact is undetermined.

So, IMO, the best way to "bluff" is just not to pay for dialog.  So if there's a treasure map . . . well, until someone pays for it to be "real" or "fake" it is neither.  Sorta like Schoedinger's cat, it is both both and neither.  ;)

[Mike Holmes]

Chris nailed it. This is why I pay for so few facts in games based off of dialog. It's usually more fun to see what the "truth" is later if/when something that somebody said turns out to be true. Or turns out not to be true.

This is a key to making Universalis play mysterious - don't pay for anything before you really have to, unless you feel the need to force the game in a particular direction early. That way, you don't know if the other players are going to go along with what some character said, or go against it. You don't even know if the character you're directing in play is lying or misinformed, or speaking the truth (or to what extent it is the truth).

For a powerful example, if a character says, "I am not the murderer," you could pay to make that a fact. But don't. It's much more interesting to establish facts later that clear the character of the murder as they're "discovered" by characters in play.

Mike

[George Moralidis]

like Schoedinger's cat, it is both both and neither

that's a very interesting way of putting it.

Mike about what you said:

From a storytelling perspective (where everyone is a GM) it is true. This is one of the strengths of Universalis, although it is not so obvious to people who haven't played (like me). The story is like a plant that grows constantly, and no one knows where it will go next. (In fact it reminds me of Kohonen's self organising maps in neural networks) Your example is very good. In this type of play no one knows who the killer is until the game reaches it's conclusion.

But there are instances where you might need to enable the storyteller to secretly determine which character the killer is, in an earlier stage of the game.
This is related to the "enigma" add-on, but is not exactly the same. Perhaps we could do this if there was an add-on where instead of coins we would play cards face down.

If the cards are red then you payed for a coin. If they are black, then you didn't. No one else is 100% sure on whether you paid or not.

Or even better, If you played a Joker card, then you haven't really paid for a coin.

Let's take the Joker variant:
(and free dialogue as well. So people don't have to pay for the fact that they are talking)

People know that someone has the joker card. But they don't know who. And they don't know when he/she will play it.
In that case John (the character) says  "i am not a murderer" and Nick (the storyteller) plays a card, face down. (it is in fact the Joker but no one knows that )

Mark (another character) says exactly the same thing and Rob (2nd storyteller) plays a card, face down (it is in fact a normal card, so he has payed a coin, but he can't prove it at this stage)

The other storytellers don't know. maybe both of them are saying the truth, maybe one of them is lying.

Later on there will be some stage in the story where Nick reveals the joker card. Either willingly or not (via investigation for example).

If there is an investigation he makes up facts to keep the other players guessing. But he doesn't want to be very obvious about trying to distract them from investigating.   

Side effects: if people are not 100% certain that this card you just played is a coin the will (and should be) reluctant about saying things that are based on this "fact". this means storytellers stop trusting one another, so maybe it would work only between players that use the PC add-on.

I think this add-on might help genres where you need an element of uncertainty. If it works, which i'm not sure it does. What do you think?

[CPXB]

George,

IME, there isn't actually a need to determine who the killer <I>really is early on.  You might want to, sure, I understand that building suspense in Universalis can be a little weird because nothing is "objective" until it's been paid for . . . so how do you surprise people?  What I do is just pretend as though my belief about a given component is true, and try to manipulate events in game so it *becomes* true.   Then tension and surprise in Uni comes from seeing which version of events is eventually ratified as true by the group.

But if you try the enigma gimmick (and I should add I encourage experimentation -- if you don't like it, you'll just stop doing it, after all) let us know how it worked out.  I'd gladly steal the idea if it works really well.  :)

[Mike Holmes]

I'm with Chris, but I'd like to hear how it might go if tried.

In fact it reminds me of Kohonen's self organising maps in neural networks

Link please!
:-)

Mike

[Tony Irwin]

Hi George,

I've been in the situation where I wanted to hide something from the rest of the group because I thought the big reveal would be fun for me and them later on (and often it is when people do this). However the more interesting your stuff is to everyone else, the more likely they are to want to contribute to it or even just "play around it" and unwittingly force you to compromise your idea. So save your coins: set aside 10 coins and think to yourself "these coins are for establishing the murderer" (or whatever). Then you can use those coins to challenge away anyone's attempts to name the murderer before you do.

Something else I did once was have an "assasin" character but didn't name him and I challenged anyone else who tried to name him. My plan was eventually to establish (which you can do with just one coin) that the assasin's identity was that of a pre-existing character in our game. As it turned out it was much cooler to keep him nameless, everyone used him and he became his own character. So that's my second point, no matter how you go about this try and leave yourself room for your secret to change and grow. You could say pay a coin for a tenet and announce to your group that "The murderer's identity is on this piece of paper that I'm going to leave on the mantlepiece for now." but you're locking yourself into something very definite. You may find that as the story grows in unexpected ways that it leaves what's written on that piece of paper far behind.

Tony