[Threshold] Basic mechanical refinements (d10 roll under but high as possible)

[Bailywolf]

   
I have made some basic mechanical refinements to the game detailed in this earlier thread.

Basic recap- Threshold (or rather On the Threshold is my modern magicians game dealing with characters sitting between the mundane and magical world, and handling (and precipitating) conflicts between them.

Characters are defined primarily by two scores (totaling 11) which describe their connection to their Identity (the mundane world and who they are in it) and their Mystery (the enigmatic elements of their nature and the otherworld they reflect).  Beneath these scores, are Traits which define specific things about the character.

What I have had difficulty with in this design is precisely nailing the resolution mechanic that does what I want it to do- simple, elegant, with a certain amount of gamey crunch, and with priorities which directly highlight some of the game's themes with each roll. 

I think I may finally have isolated just that mechanic- in no small part due to a careful re-reading of Trollbabe and The Shadow of Yesterday.  The basic question I wanted this system to ask is something like "What is winning worth to you?"

Nuts and Bolts
Basically, you try and roll a d10 under the relevant Score, and the value of a successfully rolled die is read.  Based on the opposition (either active and drawn from opposed rolls against scores) or passive (based on a fixed number), a single successful die roll may or may not be enough to achieve the stated goals the player desired from the conflict. 

Assuming either a failed roll (over the score) or an inadequate rolled value, the player then has to answer the question- is getting my way in this situation work taking risks with my character or getting into trouble?

At any point, players can elect to give in and accept the stated consequences- as defined by the opposed goals of another player, or the stated consequences by the GM, which are hashed out in a free/clear stage. 

If they chose to push it, they can use their Traits for re-rolls, but failed re-rolls impose Harm which sticks around and makes this (and further) conflicts riskier.  Successful re-rolls add to previous successes. 

Alternately, players can call resources from across the Threshold between worlds, using their magic to aid a mundane conflict or worldly skills and abilities in supernatural conflict.  This is powerful, and can be done in one of two ways- re-rolling with Traits or rolling against the other Score.  Using traits from the other score doesn't expose you to Harm in the event of failure, and rolling against the other score lets you redefine your Goals for the conflict.  Success with such crossover rolls earns you Trouble (a running point total which can create personal crisis and threaten the community), and failure on these crossover rolls earns you trouble and might precipitate a crisis which threatens your character's equilibrium and the community's integrity and health (more on the Community later on- it doesn't really bear on this basic resolution topic). 

So the two choices are basically- 'is this worth getting hurt?' or 'is this worth risking my community and relationships?

Characters will have the resources to succeed at just about anything- if the player is willing to push things far and hard enough. 

So we come to the questions...

The real basic one- how to scale the basic ladder of challenges?  What would constitute a 'typical' challenge...

Some of this has to do with campaign scaling- the Community (the 'battle map' style shared record sheet detailing all the significant elements of the shared social environment and their relationships with one another) can be anything... as small as a circle of college friends, or as large as nations.  The relative challenge remains the same though, so perhaps this isn't relevant. 

In some respects, it depends on how much pressure there is on players to push things to get their way- if the ratings are too low, players will fairly easily accumulate the needed successes.  If the ranks are too high, every conflict will turn into a community-disrupting cascade of Trouble (or discourage players by not providing enough positive outcomes... getting your way all the time isn't really fun, but doubly is never getting your way).  Also to consider is how it interacts with shifting Scores- someone rolling against a Score of 3 will typically need more successful rolls than someone with a score of 7 to get the same success total, which exposes them to more risk (in the form of harm from failed re-rolls) and temptation to get in Trouble (from cross-over Traits or rolling against the cross-over Score).

My first take was a basic rating of 5, then incrementing it by +3 to represent each significant element of opposition the character faces.  For example, trying to talk the local Board of Commissioners out of a planned re-zone which would allow a company to start a landfill in your county would be a basic 5.  However, if an established element of the game is that the President of the Board hated your father's guts, and doesn't like you much either, then you'd add 3 to that.  If the company is also bribing several Board members, then that would be another +3... bringing the total to 11.  Even with a really good score, you're still going to need several decent successes to pull it off. 

As a side note, enumerating the things which add to the basic rank might suggest ways to reduce the ranking on significant conflicts- making amends with the President of the Board before hand, or exposing the bribery to the local news paper... 

Beyond the usual- does this mechanic seem a functional and interesting one- what kind of difficulty scale would you find reasonable?

Thanks,

-Ben

[Anders Larsen]

Is there a way for the character to get rid of Trouble? You could risk that the player close to never will make a crossover roll, because Trouble will just keep on accumulating.

Can characters use magic without failing a roll first? (I have only skimmed your precious post, so this may be a stupid question).

Is there some kind of reward mechanic? A good reward mechanic could be used to balancing out the Trouble and Harm.

It may be a problem that you have to make many roll to get through some conflicts. But maybe this could be copped up into a number of smaller conflicts.


I will later use some time to read through the previous thread, then I may be able to give some more coherent feedback.

- Anders

[Bailywolf]

Is there a way for the character to get rid of Trouble? You could risk that the player close to never will make a crossover roll, because Trouble will just keep on accumulating.

Can characters use magic without failing a roll first? (I have only skimmed your precious post, so this may be a stupid question).

Is there some kind of reward mechanic? A good reward mechanic could be used to balancing out the Trouble and Harm.

It may be a problem that you have to make many roll to get through some conflicts. But maybe this could be copped up into a number of smaller conflicts.


I will later use some time to read through the previous thread, then I may be able to give some more coherent feedback.

- Anders

I left out most of the details which would answer your questions to stick within the new forum's mandate on to-the-point topics, but yeah- Trouble will eventually break lose and form a Crisis.  You get rid of it, but the Crisis threatens the whole community.  You can start right off using crosstraits or scors- you don't have to wait for a failure.  If you have a really low score, you might have to go cross-score right from the start.   I didn't mention it, but I was considering several options for rewards- boons you can take away from a successful Conflict- which can give you free re-rolls in a later conflict. 

-B

[Spooky Fanboy]

   
Beyond the usual- does this mechanic seem a functional and interesting one- what kind of difficulty scale would you find reasonable?

Thanks,

-Ben

It's serviceable as a mechanic, and on photons, it looks workable. I could not for the life of me tell you if it works without playtesting it, and my group absolutely refuses to try another game.

Looking forward to the Community Map! ;-)

[Danny_K]

It sounds workable to me.  The mechanic rewards people who have unbalanced Traits, but that's intentional, right?

Without knowing more of the actual rules, I can't give much feedback about the role of Harm vs. Trouble in getting re-rolls -- are two distinct kinds of bad outcomes really necessary?  For the kind of conspiracy-theory-drivven Umberto-Eco-type characters you've evoked so far, it might be thematic for their only method of rerolling to be using magic, with all the trouble that causes.  If I can split my "damage" between two independent pools, I'm probably going to be thrifty with it and try at all costs to avoid pumping up one of the damage pools to the point where interesting things happen.  (Just my two cents -- "Trouble" sounds a lot more interesting as a negative consequence than "Harm")

I can't say much about where to set the target numbers -- what do you think is going to be a standard Trait value, and why?  How difficult should challenges be, for the players?  And what counts as a valid reason for a modifier -- mundane things like bribery, as you suggest, or only magical stuff.  I know you're familiar with Wushu, so perhaps a free-wheeling system of on-the-fly positive and negative modifiers would work? 

I think this is a really important part of your game, since it will make the players more or less likely to get themselves in hot water by re-rolling dice.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  OK, the problem I see is that rolling 5 successes seems like an awfully high amount. Especially rolling them one at a time. In Exalted needing a 7 or higher and counting 10 as 2 successes, that would be 8 to 10 dice, converting that to your system would like 5 and under  for success more or less. So, if I wanted to perform a "Typical" challenge, I would have to narrate 8 to 10 steps of me trying, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing? It might help if you outlined what you think is "Typical" as well.
  The players are allowed to decide everything else, why not allow them to decide how much effect they want in the game world? Have them declare sow many successes they are aiming for as a sort of stakes setting and then start rolling?
  Ideally, a "Typical" challenge will be one success, and more challenging stuff will require more if you don't like my idea...
  Just some thoughts.

[Anders Larsen]

Ok, I have taken a look at the older threads.

It seems like a point in the game that you will generate a lot of Trouble and have to face the Crisis, so I don't think that the system give you too much Trouble. Maybe it is even a problem that you can get around Trouble by taking Harm. Why would players choose Trouble over Harm?

You may consider unifying Harm and Trouble. So Harm is a form of physical Trouble. Or maybe drop Harm and only have Trouble. Trouble is much more interesting than Harm.

Some questions:

I am not sure what the character actually do in this game. What are the primary goals of these people?

If you have generated a number of successes, and then fail a roll, what happens then? Do you loose your successes?

I would really like to hear your thought on the reward mechanic, especially what you can use the reward on. Maybe it could be used to deal with Crisis?

- Anders

[Bailywolf]

Let me do a shotgun post, and try and answer the points brought up by several folks at once...

Spooky Fanboy:  Harm VS Trouble & Target Numbers

To clarify- Harm is something which impairs you, makes you less effective.  It can be anything from an actual wound to a humiliation to a curse... but Harm sticks around for a while, and makes things more difficult for you in a mechanical sense.  Trouble represents a confluence of the mundane and the magical- the dissonance caused by using powers from across the divide between worlds.  Trouble has no immediate effect, and doesn't impair your further actions, but it is like borrowing money from the mafia against your family, friends, and community- when it breaks lose, it won't just affect you (or rather, it might not just affect you...), but can ripple outwards into the community along relationship links on the Map (more on this in a forthcoming post), threatening the Community.  If the damage to the community is bad enough, things can creep in- malicious demonic presences which crawl in through the cracks left in the Community when magicians have to cut elements out to stop the propagation of Trouble.  These demons set up housekeeping inside the shells of people and things, using the Links on the map to feed, draining the Community of vitality.  This is a bad thing.

Target Numbers- I'm still floating on what a good basic TN should be.  Dice are only just 0 or 1 if they roll failures (above your score)- successes have a value equal to the actual rolled number on the die.  If you have a Score of 5, and throw a 4 then you have 4 successes.  If you throw a 6, then you have 1 failure.  Characters are built by dividing 11 points between Mystery and Identity.  High scores make for better chance of success, and a higher possible max success value.  Re-roll successes simply add to the previous value. 

Using Traits from across the Threshold not only protects you from Harm (earning you Trouble instead), but 'higher order' Traits earn you automatic successes- if you invoke a Conviction (Identity) in a magical conflict or a Patron (Mystery) in a mundane conflict, you earn a success equal to the Score the conflict is based on without the need for a roll.  More on this in the character creation thread.


Dindenver:  Successes, Stakes, and Description

I'm not counting successful dice in a yes/no way, but rather similar to Blackjack- get as high as possible while staying under your Score.  If this rolled value is better than the Target, then you succeed, if not you can accept the Consequences, or you can risk Harm (or get Trouble) and re-roll. 

I pulled the 5 value out of the air- assuming a typical character who's scores are a 6/5 split.  3 might be a better starting target though, with increments of 3 up and down.

The way the reward mechanic works is by granting Boons which lower the target for a conflict where it can be applied.  Harm works the opposite, raising the Target on some conflicts.  Boons are either one-use things or they are persistent for a certain period of play- a session, a story, an arc. 

::Developer's head-knock::  Crap... ignore the word "Harm" in this and previous post... it should be "Bane" meaning any negative bad thing, whether it be injury or loss of status or bad reputation or whatever.  'Harm' is less refined version of this concept.

So, ehem, you earn Boons for especially successful handling of Conflicts, and suffer Banes when you push things and fail re-rolls and both figure into determining the Target Number you are trying to accumulate in further relevant conflicts.

For example, after a falling out with your girlfriend, you're left emotionally torched (you picked up a Bane during the break up conflict which you decided to concede and accept her moving out and taking the CD collection).  You write "Emotionally Torched (3 persistent)" on your sheet in the Banes section.  Tonight is the local poetry slam however, and you'd planned on reading some new stuff hoping to impress the local let magazine publisher into running some of your work in the Spring edition.  Last week, you stopped the propagation of a living verse that was spreading like a virus in the minds of the regulars at the coffee shop you work in, and did so with such success, you earned a Boon "Host to the Viral Verse (3 expendable)".  You ask the GM for a conflict as you step up to the microphone.  The Target is 3, plus 3 for the 'Emotionally Torched' Bane, but you expend your Viral Verse Boon to counter this... despite being ragged emotionally and unenthused about the whole thing, your poetry is imbued with a catchy rhythm that's hard for listeners to forget.  You make this roll against your Identity, and need to roll a 3 or better on the die while still getting it under your Identity score. 

Anders Larsen:  Success/Fail, Reward, & what the hell do character actually do

See above on the Success Fail.  Getting a Boon from a conflict involves beating the required Target by a certain magic threshold which I haven't identified yet.  Basic deal is that any Conflict can earn you a Boon and a Bane.

What do characters actually do?

This folds into the Community Map a bit, but basically characters are magicians, shamans, seers... whatever... people on the threshold between the magical and the mundane.  They are tasked with protecting their Community (which the player is invested in because he helps define it).  The GM can mess with the Community in specific mechanical ways, tipping balances, creating conflicts, and generally breaking the equilibrium.  Players can do this themselves- sometimes inadvertently when they lose control of their Trouble.  There are several specific kinds of external Threats- Demons (which are like parasites in the community, feeding on it and shitting poison into its social waters), Warlocks (selfish unbound magicians who unload their Trouble as curses on others, crapping up a Community in the process), required  Intercessions (handling conflicts which naturally arise between the Worlds) and Entropy (the general tendency for things to fall apart if someone doesn't look after them).  They tend their Relationships (the links they share with other elements of the Community map), deal with their own goals and motivations and other player-driven plotting.  'Normal' game adventuring stuff can nest within the more formalized stuff above.




-Ben