[The Great Art] [DexCon] Putting the damage on

[Andrew Morris]

This was the second of two table-top sessions of TGA I ran at DexCon. The first folded from lack of players, though, since it was in that all-or-nothing Wednesday time slot. So, functionally, it was the only TGA table-top session.

Players
I was a bad GM and didn't record everyone's name. There were at least nine players at the table, though, including: Nick, Judd, Rob D., Krista, Steve, Russ, Ken, Jay, and Dan. Nick is the co-creator of the game. Krista is one of my playtesters. Dan used to play in my indie gaming group, but hasn't had a chance to make the trip out for a while. Ken is a personal friend who I forced to come try the game. Steve is an old friend I haven't hung out with in years, who just happened to sign up for the games, then noticed I was the one running them. Jay is RobNJ's brother, and we realized we'd been in a LARP together years ago. Judd, Rob D., and Russ are all Forge posters, and Russ played in a two-session Mountain Witch game I ran for my indie group.

The Good Stuff
People seemed to enjoy the game, though I'd like to hear if some of them didn't enjoy it as much as they might have, and why. The characters achieved their in-game mission (retrieve a stolen amulet), though not all of them hit their personal character goals. The central mechanic held up well, despite being put through the wringer. People seemed to get it, and gamed the system for resources, which is what I'd intended. Much like in Capes, the way to get resources is to do something that conflicts with another character, leading to all sorts of fun character interaction and conflict. Steve obviously got it, and made a choice to gain power right off the bat, blowing resources left and right to get the upper hand over the others.

Players stayed around after the session was over to give lots of good feedback and criticism. Some of it is simply a difference of opinion in play styles, but some of it was really good mechanics stuff that I have to think over and incorporate.

The Bad Stuff
With so many Forgites at the table, it was inevitable that someone would grab Director Stance through the conflict resolution mechanics. Since one of the explicit rules is that as long as everyone at the table agrees on stakes, those stakes will be resolved, you could certainly do it by defining stakes like, "I want to discover proof that he is the traitor." Though I'd never intended the rules to support that, everyone seemed on board with it, and no one voiced objections, so I ran with it. My pre-established idea of what really happened went out the window in the first ten minutes of game play. Then the challenge became keeping track of what had already been defined through previous conflicts so we wouldn't violate them. That took a whole lot of energy that I simply didn't have after participating in the Iron GM contest the day before.

A few of the players seemed to withdraw and stay out of the conflicts over stakes, either observing and doing nothing, or going off and doing something else in game. That's bad in my book, and I had my hands full dealing with all the action, so I really didn't pull them in as much as I feel I should have.

We had the crappy alcove table that catches all the noise in the room and echoes it, so it was nearly impossible to hear the players on the other side of the table. I ditched my chair in the first 15 minutes and didn't sit down for the rest of the session.

Overall
On the whole, I consider the session a success. I had fun, most of the players seemed to have fun, and I learned a lot that my playtesting up to this point hadn't revealed. The energy level was high, even though the noise and confusion took something away from the game.

I'

[Andrew Morris]

Oops...accidentally hit the post button.

I'd really like to hear from some of the players at that game, and see how their perception differs from mine.

[Rob Donoghue]

I think your breakdown is about right, but I'm going to hit on a particular point: the skills.

I dig the fact that the pricing of the skills is story driven - It's a great approach.  That said, I'm wondering about the role of skills in the game.  One thing (and this carries forward a bit from Amber stuff) about playing a group of folks at the top of the mystical food chain is that everything on your sheet is really about how you relate to other players, not to the world at large, and in that context, I wonder if you could do with an even simpler skill setup.

I guess the angle I'm coming at this from is based upon what I remember about the characters at the table, and the ones I remember (which is to say the Ex Thief, the Aristocrat and the Power Nerd) come back because of something iconic about the character rather than any sheet-driven differentiation.  Given just the sheets, there was less that immediately said "This characvter is an XYZ" than I would have really hoped for.  I recognize that that's not a _necessity_ for a game, but for games happening at the kind of level that the Great Art seems to, that element of clean, immediate distinction between characters is pretty potent.

Here's the bit I found telling - for a game about capital M Magi, the section on the character sheet for skills is three times bigger than the area for magic, and that seems to communicate a different sense of priorities than I got from the description.  Now, that may mean that I misunderstood the priorities, but that was a disconnect I bumped my nose against.  In short, do you see characters as most strongly defined by their skills, their magic, or something else? (I'm going to object if the answer is stats - the system is awesome, but it's more foundation than frame, so to speak).

Getting late enough that I can no longer tell if I'm making sense, but good luck. I'm really watching this with curiosity.

-Rob D.

[Andrew Morris]

Rob, I have to say the feedback you gave at the convention was some of the best I've received. The whole thing about "perceiving" skills being more valuable than "doing" skills was great. The next revision will take that into account, thought probably through more carefully outlining what can be called for in stakes than in changing the skills themselves.

On your post here, yes, you're making sense, but I'd love to get some elaboration. How would you go with a simpler skill setup? This is actually something I'd really like to hear more about, because skills are almost an afterthought, apart from the few high utility skills (Research, Meditation, Detect Lies, etc.).

As to the character sheet...well...to be entirely honest, it's just a working sheet that has spaces to record everything. I have zero layout skills, and I personally feel it looks terrible. And you're right -- skills take up the biggest chunk of space, but that's because I couldn't figure out a better way to do it in Word. Yeah, that's right -- my layout skills are so poor, I use Word for layout. Why? Because I have it on my computer and I know how to make tables with it. That's it.

As to what I see as most defining about characters, I'd have to say it's their goals. All the other components are just mechanical fiddly bits that define how they go about achieving goals. Even magic is just a cooler way to achieve their goals.

[Judd]

Maybe it is just my library student side talking but in a game about modern magic where research can help gain you the True Names of spirits so that you can control them, Librarian was a skill on the not so useful list.

Huh.

I thought we spent too much time discussing stakes and not enough time playing.

Did anyone ever use magic at the table?  I did not.  If not, why not?

There were a few times when someone wanted to do something and you told them they couldn't because that wasn't the way magic worked or wasn't the way the Hermetic Society worked, despite the ideas being pretty cool.  If there are specific ideas you want for magic, they should be embedded right in there or told to us or something.  I'm all about the setting bending with the cool and it rubbed me wrong when a cool idea was shot down because it isn't how the GM sees the setting working.

It wasn't an idea involving cat-people ninja or anything either.

I think the way the card swapping works is really neat.  I enjoyed how people were throwing conflicts and introducing cool conflicts sthat others would stand in the way of just to get each other's cards.

There's a good seed here, really good.

[Rob Donoghue]

Goals are a good point.  To some extent, it was only at the end of things that I realized how potent they could have been.  For some reason, I'd assumed everyone's short term goals were roughly like mine, or at least close enough that they would be at conflict, and it was only at the end that I realized how badly I'd misunderstood.

For skills, there's a small disconnect in that you have a small number of things (magic) which seem to require and explicit set of skills and the rest of the list is freeform.  While I conceptually dig freeform skills, as design, I don't think you want a mixed bag - with the current model, an explicit skill list (ideally a fairly short one), even if you leave room for a wild card slot, would probably be the easiest fix.

Other approaches depend on some concept stuff.  One of the points that's driven home in the description of the setting is how far above mortal concerns the Artisans are - that they're at a whole other level.  I admit, I didn't _feel_ like that was the case, and part of that was the skills.  Having every skill at 1 by default is an intellectual answer to why it is so, but it doesn't really _feel_ like that means very much.

As a comparison, in the Amber DRPG having a stat at 0 means you have it at Amber level, which is to say, you are still better than any mortal could ever hope to be.  The absolute best a human could be is -10 (chaos level) and you kick their ass.  As written, it sounds like you should be able to leave a stat at 0 and still be kind of cool, but in practice, if you're going to leave it at 0, you have just marked yourself as everyone's bitch in that category.  This is partly the psychology of something, anything, being perceived as being better than nothing, but it's also because of an inevitable law of roleplaying systems - anything interesting will put up more resistance.  In short, in Amber, with a 0 stat you can win any fight that doesn't matter at all, and that's not very satisfying.  Knowing I have any skill at 1, just like everyone else, feels similarly hollow.

Hmm.  I think part of the problem may be in the cards themselves (the specifics of the cards that is – as a whole, the cards are awesome, especially for the hidden information component).  One weakness in the current approach is that the range of the cards is pretty massive.  In any contest we saw, any card over 7 had a huge likelihood of making all the difference in the world.  Those were rare, certainly, but the distribution of cards in your hand was _so_ important that I think it needs some sort of hard rule on how card swapping and hand building is done.  That seemed to be a very soft area of the rules, but the tactical advantage of having one big card and a range of small cards was so great that it created some odd points, most notably, it meant that the estimation part of the cardplay was really rough to pin down because the margin of error was so substantial.

I'm not explaining this clearly, so let me use an example.  Imagine that the system did not allow any card higher than, say, a 5.  Given that, when I'm in a contest, I have a decent gauge of what a true "all in" is, 5x the number of cards, and I can make some calculations like "What's the likelihood that he has that many 5's?" and put it together as best I can.  That feels like a calculated risk.

If there is a non-zero, but not high, chance that he's going to have some 6-10s, suddenly I have no real basis for my calculations.  I can no longer reasonably estimate what he might do, so I will just throw in whatever I think feels right and hope I get lucky.  That works, of course, but I think it removes many of the benefits of having cards in the first place.

As an extension of this, some manner of control on the number of zeros someone can have in their hand seems necessary.  There's no disincentive for grabbing as many of them as you possibly can because, especially if you can rope in the GM, if you have an excess to burn, you can use them to milk the GM.  Now, I'm entirely in favor of milking the GM, but some sort of constraint would be handy (For example, after characters pick up their point cards, they receive enough face cards to bring their hand size up to, say, 10 cards in each suit).

An extension of _this_ is that the prospect of being able to go back to the deck and re-arrange your cards to consolidate low ones or break up a high one is so incredibly powerful that there needs to either be a strict mechanic for doing it or it needs to be entirely disallowed.  It's too potent to be a soft point.

There's also a weird bit of math that makes player v player contests mechanically different than player v. GM contests.  I don't have the numbers crunch to prove it, but I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that the GM's pulling X cards and the player playing X cards is going to favor the Gm more often than not (at least early in the game) whereas with two players against each other, they're on more equal footing.  That means I want to play more cards against the GM if I can, though that hits another wall.  Ultimately, I have very little choice in how many cards I'm going to get to play.  First - because I can always just pad with 0's, I _always_ want to play the maximum number of cards I can (at least against another player) so what should be a tactical choice actually isn't.  Even within the skills at present, the potential range of choices is small enough that it allows things like looking at the sheet and realizing you will never play more than two cards _ever_, which is a little daunting.

I've drifted pretty far off skills, and it is late, and I'm tired, so I'll take a break here.  I am, I admit, a little worried that I sound like I'm taking a piss on this, and I'm not - when I say there's some awesome at the core here, I mean there's enough awesome that I end up dwelling on the crazy fiddly bits because I dig it.  So that said, if I'm getting into crazy town or, worse, into non-helpful town, say the word and I'll chill, no harm, no foul. :)

-Rob D.

PS - And I totally sympathize with the layout necessities of word.  I honestly don't think it was that big a deal, but I figured it was a good illustration of what would jump out at the players the first time they saw the sheet (though notably, the _first_ thing one notices is the card motif, so that's doing it's job, I think).

[Andrew Morris]

Wow, lots of meaty stuff to respond to. Forgive the line-by-line quoting, I'm only doing it to keep everything clear and simple.

Maybe it is just my library student side talking but in a game about modern magic where research can help gain you the True Names of spirits so that you can control them, Librarian was a skill on the not so useful list.

Yeah, I didn't explain that well. Research is specifically magical research – figuring out arcane references and seeing through all the deliberate obfuscations and such. Career Skill: Librarian is the skill set needed to work as a librarian. So yes, the latter is totally a doctorate level field of study, but it doesn't do anything to help you understand magical truth. No insult intended to your career, Judd. It's just that career skills are mostly color in the game. If the player find a way to work them into a session, good for him.

I thought we spent too much time discussing stakes and not enough time playing.

Yes. Any thoughts on how to speed it up?

Did anyone ever use magic at the table?  I did not.  If not, why not?

Yes. Most people who did, did so in secret, using very small amounts of it so the rest of you wouldn't notice. There was at least one protective circle created, and several spirits summoned.

There were a few times when someone wanted to do something and you told them they couldn't because that wasn't the way magic worked or wasn't the way the Hermetic Society worked, despite the ideas being pretty cool.  If there are specific ideas you want for magic, they should be embedded right in there or told to us or something.  I'm all about the setting bending with the cool and it rubbed me wrong when a cool idea was shot down because it isn't how the GM sees the setting working.

It wasn't an idea involving cat-people ninja or anything either.

I'm not sure how I could have covered everything in the introduction. I could easily discuss the setting for the whole four hours.

Also, I don't intend for TGA to be the next revolutionary thing. I'm aiming more for something that synthesizes all the wonderful theory and techniques here, but gives a solid foundation for traditional gamers to latch onto. For that reason, as I revise the game, I'll probably be limiting stakes to rule out those reality altering-type stakes we had in the session.

Oh, and cat-people ninja are in the next version. How did you guess?

I think the way the card swapping works is really neat.  I enjoyed how people were throwing conflicts and introducing cool conflicts sthat others would stand in the way of just to get each other's cards.

There's a good seed here, really good.

Thanks. That's what I really wanted from the game.

Goals are a good point.  To some extent, it was only at the end of things that I realized how potent they could have been.  For some reason, I'd assumed everyone's short term goals were roughly like mine, or at least close enough that they would be at conflict, and it was only at the end that I realized how badly I'd misunderstood.

Well, I'm sure most of that confusion is that it was the first time I'd run it publicly, with people who didn't have the benefit of lengthy conversations about the setting and mechanics beforehand. I don't feel I did a good job of explaining things like goals. One player (in the LARP session I ran later) thought that factional goals were orders he'd gotten, rather than how his personal drives intersected with the nature of his magical society.

For skills, there's a small disconnect in that you have a small number of things (magic) which seem to require and explicit set of skills and the rest of the list is freeform.  While I conceptually dig freeform skills, as design, I don't think you want a mixed bag - with the current model, an explicit skill list (ideally a fairly short one), even if you leave room for a wild card slot, would probably be the easiest fix.

I thought about a fixed skill set. To be honest, it doesn't have one because I'm lazy. Also, the thought of considering every possible action and deriving skills from that makes me want to cry. I'm very close to just dropping skills entirely and having all challenges be a single card. However, I do want a way to let characters develop over time in a way that doesn't give well-developed characters so much advantage that starting characters could never stand up to them, and skills seem like a great way to do so.

In short, in Amber, with a 0 stat you can win any fight that doesn't matter at all, and that's not very satisfying.  Knowing I have any skill at 1, just like everyone else, feels similarly hollow.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I consider that to be a good thing. You are on a whole different level than mortals, but that doesn't mean so much when you realize that all the other Artisans are as well.

I see what you're saying about the high difficulty in predicting bids. One part of me says you should be choosing your bid because it's worth that much to you, not because you're trying to beat your opponent by the least amount possible. The other part says, "but that stuff's fun!" So I don't know yet. I'll have to think about it. What would you think about something like card  +skill = total bid, if you could only use one card? How's that affect the predictability aspect? My math skills are average to low-average.

PS - And I totally sympathize with the layout necessities of word.  I honestly don't think it was that big a deal, but I figured it was a good illustration of what would jump out at the players the first time they saw the sheet (though notably, the _first_ thing one notices is the card motif, so that's doing it's job, I think).

Funnily enough, I only thought to add the card motif after about the 50th time someone asked, "what suit goes with what attribute?"

[Rob Donoghue]

Lemme zero in on what I thought was awesome, and see if it syncs with your ideas.

I love the card swapping, first and foremost, and the flow of resources it dictates.

I love that the cards are face down and maybe of 0 value makes it an interesting risk and introduces and element of bluffing and pure gameplay that makes the exchange fun beyond the specifics of the stakes at hand.

Given those points, I think there are tweaks that could be made that support the awesome, but before I go down that path, my question to you is: What awesome have I missed?

-Rob D.

[Andrew Morris]

In relation to the mechanics? You haven't missed anything, that I can see.

Fire away with suggestions, I love hearing them. Based on your earlier comments, I've been toying with the idea of taking away the "bid as many cards as you have points in Skill" rule and just saying that you bid one card and that your Skill adds to your effective bid.

[Rob Donoghue]

I admit, I'm nerding a little bit on the things that are cool about cards.  Consider if, for example, your first card was face up.  Not sure it actually works, but in terms of the sophistication it adds to the bluffing?  Hell yeah.

That said, going to one card only removes one of the biggest cheats in the game - going to maximum skill against the GM with two or three face cards.  Not that I, er, did that or anything.  The only thing I'd suggest is opening up the skill range a little if you do so, so 5 is about as rare as 3's are now, just so the proportion of the skills to the range of possible outcomes is a little closer together.  Single card keeps the cards important, but makes skills matter more visibly now, especially with high skills - if a character has a defining skill (whihc is to say, it's high) then the cards are less of a factor than if it's a color skill, and a totally dig that.  Beyond the skill range thing, single card resolution makes a lot of my other concerns sort of vanish in a puff of smoke.  So nice job cutting out the knees form under me with your reasonability, you dirty bastard! :)

So that comes back to the skills, and I've had a chance to think about it a little.  You have a skill set that is very task oriented (I pick a pocket, I hit the guy with a rock) but your resolution is, potentially, much broader.  As such, if I want to, say, punch a guy, we're not using the cards to see if I hit him, we're using them to resolve what it means.  At the moment, that's kind of a disconnect, and I think itmay have fed into some of the stakes-setting issues we ran into, because the skills don't provide any structure to the process.

I wonder, and I'm totally spinnign into crazyland here, if you could break down a list of general _approaches_, say, 2 per stat that would be things like Force & Resistance for physical, Deceit & Cooperation for social, Cunning & Understanding for menatl and Magic split however is genre-appropriate, or perhaps not at all*.  Under a model like this, skills become trappings on these approaches.  If your approach to a sproblmen is violence (Force) then the fact that you have the gunplay skill might add to your force rating so long as you include the gunplay in the narrative.  This would, for example, allow Judd to use that Librarian skill in the way he feels is appropriate, provided he can narrate it, which is kind of satisfying.

THat said, I was thinking back over the session, and I realized I was never clear on how combat (as stuff that resulted in damage) rolled out compared to other stuff.  It felt almost like another system, which was odd. Am I crazy?

-Rob D.


* Specifics of the list are just as examples. As I think abotu it, you prlobably want at least 3 per, if only for speed, social force (intimidation) and perceptive.

[Andrew Morris]

Heh. I think the cards are cool, too, Rob. I like the tactile element of it, and there's something very enjoyable to the feeling of "Bam! I bid a ten! In your face!"

The only thing that worries me with the "one card plus skill" idea is that it opens up the possibility that you can not only lose the conflict, but lose the resources you bid as well. I really want the resolution to be a matter of the guy who wants it more paying off the other guy in resources. Like I said, just tossing the idea around at this point.

I somewhat see what you mean about the disjunction between skills and resolution, and making skills broader in scope might address that. I'd be more inclined to limit the scope of resolution, though. The game was never meant to have a flexible setting, but rather a setting that provides a skeleton around which the conflict stakes can take place.

[Rob Donoghue]

Cool, narrowing the scope would totally address it too.  I think you've already observed that the scope of the stakes we were setting was probably beyond your intent, so finding a way to rein that in will also do the trick.

-Rob D.

[Rob Donoghue]

Ah ha! I think I've got it.

The specific problem we ran into with stakes setting was that there was no structure to correlate between the action being taken and how far removed the consequences were.  Consider for example the following uses of an unarmed combat skill:

• I beat him up.  This is a direct, causal outcome.
• I beat him up so badly he tells me where the diamonds are.  This outcome is one step removed from the situation.
• I beat him up so badly that he looks like a fool in front of the whole school, and he has to transfer to siberia.  At this point, you're geting anywhere from two to four steps removed from the original action.
• I beat him so badly that the king grants me a title and the Masters of the Fist (who I just invented) induct me into their secret order.  I am now going out to the moon with the extent of how far I'm deriving.
  

Now, these differences aren't a problem in and of themselves.  A given group can probably find their tolerance point anywhere along the spectrum, but the problem arises (especially in con games) because there is no language to address these different levels of derivation, then people can come to the table with strongly differing expectations.  In that situation, the person with the more restrictive expectations is generally going to feel sleighted.  What's more, a well intentioned player may continue to see how far they can push the envelop with the extent of their derivation because there is nothing in place holding them in check.

(Now, note that PTA escapes this trap because it's structure is fairly rigid - it doesn't call for a draw until the conflict is already self-evident.  TGA has no such rstructure).

When we played, I think this was, in part, one of the big reasons that Stakes got so far out of hand.  I'm not sure exactly how to address it - I don't know where you want the dial to be set - but I think this particular area of structure may merit some attention.

-Rob D.

[Andrew Morris]

Rob, the more I think about this, the more I realize I don't want anyone to do much with, say, Unarmed Combat, other than beat someone up or avoid getting beat up themself. But....

I thought we were covered with by the fact that any participant can deny stakes. Thinking back on it, it seems that the folks who might have objected were not involved in the conflicts, and seemed to retreat somewhat during them. On the other hand, those who liked the conflicts to be several steps removed were often jumping into conflicts whenever possible.

Maybe the answer is to extend veto power to everyone at the table, rather than just those involved in the conflict. This means that, as in Dogs, the most demanding player sets the tone.

[Rob Donoghue]

Yah, that would probably go a long way.  I think you're right that ti was the peopel who weren't in the conflict who were more likely to object, but since they weren't involved, when it passed the by, that increased the likelihood they'd stay disengaged.

-Rob D.