[The Apostles] Setting Good Stakes

[Bret Gillan]

The basic notion: this game is supposed to reward good stakes-setting. That's sort of the point of it. To take a scene, dig down beneath the layers of what's going on, and say, "What if this is actually what it's all about?" The overall fiction of the game will follow a group of normal who help a messiah figure to liberate humanity from places called Factories in a post-apocalyptic future where they're held by aliens or mutants or whatever. The Apostles help the messiah to keep going when he/she's tired, disillusioned, wounded, etc. Whether they succeed at this is determined by how the conflicts in the game play out.

Players have a pool of dice - we'll say one of each of your polyhedrals - d4 through d20. After a Scene is brought to what looks like a Conflict of interest, each player offers up something at Stake. You then hand dice to other players - you can only roll a die you've been given, the pool is a resource you distribute.

You then roll against the GM or a target number set by the GM or whatever and compare your totals. If you win you gain or keep what's at stake, if you lose you lose it.

That's the rule mechanic stripped down to its slimmest. So my question is:

Do you think this mechanic does what I intend it to do, which is basically to reward good stakes-setting?

Thanks.

[Josh Roby]

Do you think this mechanic does what I intend it to do, which is basically to reward good stakes-setting?

So I'm going to end up with a number of dice equal to the number of other players in the game?  If I'm playing with a GM and three players, players will be rolling two dice?  Do I got that down right?

I think it's an interesting proposal.  It's more sort of a drill than a full-fledged game, though.  Unless there's other stuff that includes, you know, characterization and all that? ;)

I'd love to hear/read/see a playtest.

[Bret Gillan]

Joshua,

We'll say all the players, excluding the GM, has one of each: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and a d20. In a given Scene, you may give no dice or as many dice to any of the players sitting at the table. These dice do not refresh between Scenes and are a limited resource that must be parcelled out carefully.

So in a given Conflict you could be rolling handfuls of dice or no dice at all based on how interesting the Stakes you've set are.

There is other stuff to include characterization and all that, but right now I'm giving you the stripped-down, bare minimum of the game because this is the engine that everything else will be built around. This is basically the primary resolution and reward mechanic of the game. There's more but it's nothing I feel is necessary to discuss right now. Does that seem fair/sensible?

[TonyLB]

Well, what's the benefit of getting good dice from the other players, beyond winning your Stakes?

Because, y'know, if your only goal is to not lose painful Stakes then it's much easier to just not propose painful Stakes.  Proposing cool Stakes is a gamble ... you risk something cool, but you hope that you'll get enough dice to not actually get smacked.

For that gamble to make sense, my intuition is that you have to be taking the risk in order to get a reward that you wouldn't get otherwise.

[Bret Gillan]

Well, here's some elaboration one of the other game concepts:

In a given Scene, whether Conflicts succeed or not counts towards a great Conflict and what happens at Endgame - does the Messiah successfully save humanity, or does the Messiah die ignobly or give up the fight.Winning or losing Conflicts counts towards this one way or the other.

Now it seems to me that I as a player am going to hand out dice to the other players who are setting the coolest and most potentially painful Stakes because I want to see them win. If the Stakes are a total wussfest and I don't care if they're won or lost, I'm not going to hand over my dice - they're a finite resource. On the other hand, if I don't hand out dice, the Messiah will lose the fight.

Now, it seems to me like I have a setup in which the dice will naturally float towards the people with the coolest Stakes, but I can see how it might need to be "kicked up a notch." So what if in addition to "story-stakes" you're also gambling with resources on your character sheet - skills and weapons and relationships and even interests and dreams (things you can use to give yourself dice or reroll or lower the GM's difficulty or somesuch) - and the more you stake the greater the payoff, which means if I want to get something cool not only do I have to risk some crazy stuff but I also have to count on the players finding it interesting enough to be on-board, and since they only have finite dice I have to outdo everyone else at the table.

Does this sound like a resolution to your problem, Tony?

[TonyLB]

Oooh ... like your relationship with the Messiah?  Suddenly I'm getting very good flashes of Under The Bed.

Like, the overall competition with the GM is to make sure that the Messiah ushers in a new golden age.  But the individual goal (above and beyond that) is to shape what that golden age looks like.

[Bill_White]

There is the potential for gamesmanship in the set-up you've described, in that players whose interests diverge from the stake-setter's will never be motivated to push over some dice.  In other words, if by withholding dice I can prevent you from obtaining the resources you need to achieve your goal, I won't give you dice, regardless of how "cool" I think your stakes are.  Now, you can do the same thing to me, and thus doom the Messiah to an ignomious fate of despair or ostracism, so we're motivated in that way to cooperate.  So it's possible that players will try to avoid conflict by setting stakes that are relatively innocuous and then rely on a kind of tit-for-tat mechanism wherein I give you dice if you don't mess with my interests and expect the same for you.

So I think something else may be needed (in addition to what you've got already) to push the stake-setting into the kind of dynamics you're interested in.  As Tony suggests, an interplayer conflict wherein the kind of utopia the messiah ushers in matters to you as much as the overall success or failure of his ministry is a good idea. This could possibly be formalized with a set of "ideological axes" along which the Messiah's teachings are located, and which determine what kind of ideology he ultimately inspires.  "On a scale of technophobia/technophilia from 1 to 10, we ended up with a 7!  Hooray for me!"  Players could be required to choose where their apostle falls on the relevant scales, and success/victory/rewards could be tied to that (narrative power, maybe).

Additionally, some kind of mechanism wherein the dice-giving player can ask for a concession in the stakes in order for the stake-setter to actually pick up the die may be useful. 

So:

"If I win, the Messiah pronounces machines to be anathema; if I lose, he blesses them.  I'll risk a two-point shift on the Technophilia scale." [maybe you have to spend some other resource or currency to validate this.  Or maybe there's some limit on how big a shift you can propose at once; or maybe this is not the way your game will handle this]

Luddite Thomas gives you his d12 (because he likes your idea).

Techno-Judas gives the DM his d20 (to oppose you outright).

"Tell you what," says Pastoral Pete (who doesn't mind a middling technophilia score), "make it one point and I'll give you my d8."

"I'll give you my d8, too," says Mater Magdalena, "if domestic labor-saving devices are specifically excluded from the anathema, so that there's a one-point shift toward the Female Equality side of the women's status axis."

At this point, you can either stick to your guns (you've got the d12, after all) or accept one or both of the offered revisions in order to get a better chance of winning.

[Bret Gillan]

In my efforts to have a focused, concentrated thread, it looks like I've left out some major details about what I wanted out of the game, which was my mistake. Let me elaborate on "what I want" to provide a context for this mechanic. The "affecting the future of the setting" notions are cool, but I think it's pulling away from what I want the game to be about: a group of people who help a super-figure achieve greatness even if it means carrying him. I'm drawing a direct inspiration from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the Messiah would be Buffy and all the PCs would be the "Scooby gang."

So, some important features:

- The group as a whole creates the Messiah. The Messiah could be an infant, a child with destructive psychic powers, a tired warrior - anything. The important thing is that the group, in and out of character, has to want the Messiah to win.
- The game will be focused around the Factories - places where humans are held as cattle or slave labor by vile, inhuman creatures (for the sake of brevity, hereby called 'Mutants'). The group travels from Factory to Factory, freeing the humans and battling the Mutants. The Messiah is the only one who can accomplish this, and is prophesied to do so.
- The individual events of the Factory will affect the large scale battle and whether the Messiah wins or gives up. I'm imagining scenes where the Messiah is too tired to carry on and the Apostles talk him into continuing, and help him. It is not up to the Messiah to win, he needs the Apostles.

So, that said, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree with these rules and they're not really doing what I want to accomplish. The way I imagined it interplaying was that players would try to create compelling conflicts with interesting things at stake, whether they succeeded at those conflicts would be determined by how engaged the other players were, and the players would be driven to provide feedback in the form of dice to stakes-setting in conflicts because if they didn't and if nobody succeeded at winning their stakes, the Messiah would fail.

I think direct competition would hinder this set-up. I'm imagining the system working like PTA fan mail - yes in a way you're competing with one another for that fan mail, but you're doing so by directly engaging the other players and entertaining them.

That said, my original purpose in creating this mechanic is to encourage players to engage one another, and come up with cool stakes. I'm looking for feedback on how well you think this mechanic does this, or whether you think I'm shooting far afield from what my game is really about. I like the notion of a mechanical risk being staked on a given Conflict as well as narrative stakes, because players could be engaged by a Conflict because they may want to see what does or doesn't happen to a character as a result of the outcome, and will likely incorporate this.

And I realize without actual play this is all speculation. Basically I'm digging through a swirling cloud of thoughts before I sit down and write up a playtest draft of the rules at this point, but I'm excited about this idea and I think it will work.

[Bill_White]

Okay, I think I get what you're looking for.  I'll reiterate my earlier point, which I think still holds, and then try to elaborate it in light of the details you've specified.

The dice trading mechanism creates an interdependence between players, which requires them to engage in some fashion with each other.  Whenever you set the stakes of a conflict, I can choose to give you dice or not for whatever reason I choose.  But not all of those reasons have anything to do with how cool (incisive, narratively satisfying, whatever).  Maybe I give you dice so that you'll give me dice when it's my turn.  Maybe I give you dice because I think you're a good guy and I don't want you to be mad at me.  Maybe I give you dice because I want our side to win, and I'm not about to let us dick ourselves.

So dice-granting only matters when it's a trade-off; when by giving you dice I'm potentially helping you achieve your interest at the expense of mine.  Which means that the players' interests must diverge in some way for this game to be interesting as a game.  You can do this by allowing variation in values, whether they are about ends (what the messiah ultimately achieves) or means (how he or she achieves it).

[LordRahvin]

This is a three part post:
1)
I think Bill has half of this issue covered very well, and I'd say you put more attention into his critiques before dealing with mine.  However, Bill's example only looks at 1 on 1 issue of the die distribution mechanic.  Do I give a player this die?  What's in it for me?  There's another issue to consider and that's the group dynamic.  Clearly, I MUST give the die to someone since I can't use it myself, so even if the situation isn't ideal to give it out is better than not, right?  Looking at it from this way, it's important to see not whether or not the dice will be given in a certain situation (i.e., "stakes"), but rather who will get the die from me this session assuming it MUST BE GIVEN OUT.

I think part of the problem revealed by Bill can be dealt with in answering this question.  If you yourself were in this situation, with a handful of dice you have to give to other players, who would you give them out to?  Would you give them out only to people who's goals help yours?  Only to people who set the biggest stakes?  The biggest thing I want to ask you is whether or not you can picture a situation in which one player WILL ALWAYS get the most dice based on the criteria of giving them out. 

2)
The idea of a game like this sounds really cool, but as a GM, gets me slightly on edge. Personally I think it's cool, but there's a lot more to consider than whether or not an idea sounds cool.  Consider this, for example.  Suppose you had a party of one GM and four players and at the end of the first session the GM noted that two his players always helped eachother, and only eachother with helping dice while a third player complained than no one ever helped him and, annoyed, the other players then refused to help him.  What advice would you give to that GM?  Are there in-game considerations that can be used to help the situation, or will you just suggest this might be an incompatable group of players for this game?  Or is this exactly the kind of game play you'd like to see?  (I think this also highlights Bill's point -- that players may distribute dice for many reasons, some of which will be impossible to predict.)

3)
To a certain extent, almost everything can be dealt with by inducing flavor and color.  This is just the way these types of games work.  If you can get your players to agree not to work by self-interest but by stakes evaluation, you just kind of have to trust that it will happen.  Don't be afraid of this.  Mechanics aren't the only way, or even the best way, to solve every role-playing challenge.  By refining your abilities to communicate your (the game designer's) idea to the group and offering examples of game play, maybe the group in the above example would eventually learn to play "the right way".  Maybe not.  It's worth considering, either way, I think.

4)
This isn't actually on topic, because you were looking for methods of evaluations rather than suggestions, but what do you think of this idea:  Each player is encouraged (required?) to set additional stakes for failure when adding a bonus die. 

Bill: "Hey, I need to open the garage door.  Someone want to toss some dice my way?"
Jill: "No way.  You didn't help me when I tried to jump the guard."
Bill: "Aww, come on."
Will: "Hey, Bill.  Since Jill won't help you, you can have one of my d6s."
Bill: "Hey, thanks man.  I'll remember this."
Will: "But if you lose, the door is too heavy for you and falls while you lift it.  You're pinned under when the guards hear the commotion."
Bill: "I hate you."
Will: (hands over the d6)
Bill: "Thanks man.  I'LL REMEMBER THIS!"

Has an entirely different feel than what you're proposing, but this way players who have conflict with each other can screw others.  You still have the potential for "alliances" where two guys could just come in agreement to help eachother and be easy on one another.  The advantage, though, is when they run out of dice, I doubt the other players will be as easy on them...


Whatever you decide to do, I think the important thing is just to keep thinking about it.  Don't be concerned with "is this the right way to go" right now; just picture as many different gaming situations as you can and then evaluate whether or not you like the results.  If I absolutely had to answer your initial question, I'd say no, the mechanics you suggested won't lead to the outcome you're hoping for, but that's not to say that it couldn't or that you should abandon it.  Play with it and see where it takes you...