Shards of the Titans [Game Setting advice; System in development]

[SpazMan]

Hello "The Forge",

This is my first post, and I have only recently started looking into The Forge. I have been recently listening to back archives of podcasts such as the Sons of Kryos, Theory from the Closet, and The Master plan (thank you podcasters if you see this, your podcasts have been great). And as a result the hamster wheel has been turning and working over time. I have revived a concept that I had years ago worked on and then discarded. I started from scratch and I think I am liking what is coming out this time around, however I am not sure good ways to encourage (or in some cases write down clearly) some of the themes I want to get through in this game.

First of I want feedback on the clarity of my setting idea and the statement of what my game is about.
I have most of my notes (in a semi organized but incomleat) on my blog, which I hope you will take a look at if this seams interesting to you.
http://spazingames.blogspot.com/2007/06/shards-of-titans-new-game-concept.html

Shards of the Titans is about two things, Gaining Power, and Fighting Other Supernatural Beings to gain and keep that power. With that in mind it is also a game about the changing of the world; either changed by you or in the face of a changing world.

In a place not unlike our worlds 19th century, mythic beings start appearing around the world, and the only thing that is know for sure is that some people have had visions, dreams, or forgotten memories about the clash of titans at the start (or end) of creation. The intent is for the players to play the mythic and legendary entities. Everyone gain more personal power, both mundane and supernatural, though defeating other beings, especially their enemies or rivals.
The game is intended to focus on direct conflict and accomplishing goals.

This is something new to me so if I am missing something or just blathering on like a loon let me know so I can try and work harder to get my points to come across the right way.

[Adam Dray]

Hey there, Michael! Welcome to the Forge! Hopefully we can help you out. I am reading over your manuscript and commenting as I go along.

It has a task based resolution system. This is to keep players focused on how they get to their goals rather than focusing on the goal itself.

"Task-based resolution" is one of those terms that people have a hard time agreeing about meaning. I assume you mean that players will make rolls against their skills in small little steps and a bunch of those will come together somehow and help the players determine what happens in the fiction. The problems with this approach is the "whiff factor" (My godling just failed his freaking roll! How lame!) and figuring out who has authority to figure out if those steps lead anywhere, how many steps there are leading to the goal, and who decides if the final step made it to the top. Such systems often leave it all in the hands of the GM, in short saying, "keep asking for rolls till the players have rolled enough so that it matches with your expectations of how hard this should be." It's a kind of institutionalized but well-hidden GM fiat. There are ways to put some controls around that, I think, and it's a perfectly good mechanic if designed with these things in mind.

I like your 3d10-pool, add dice for invoked traits, sum the two highest. Simple and elegant. I totally don't understand the "augmenting Modifiers" stuff though. Is this modifier a number you add to the two highest dice? This seems inelegant. You've introduced an additional operation but I can kinda see their power in play (especially with the +2 before the roll, +1 after the roll, rule). Cool.

I think your high level outline of play is missing some stuff that you might want to think about. What happens between "Game and character generation" and "Accumulation of Power" / "Accomplishing goals"? That is, what do the players and character do in there and how do they do it? I create my character. We have a group goal. Do I have personal goals? How do I come up with those? How does the GM use those to generate a scenario for the players?

Also, how are players rewarded? How do they get Crystal Points? How do they gain power? Once they attain their goals, then what? How open-ended is this -- that is, how long can they continue to gain powers before they're unstoppable and the game isn't fun any more?

You say that Shards of the Titans is about gaining power and fighting to keep that power, but it's also about changing the world. How important is that last bit? Is it a side thought or a fundamental part of the game? How is "the world" modeled in your game and, then, how are changes made to it? This seems like one of those things that should not be left to the GM and players to muddle through entirely on their own.

Further, why do the characters want to gain power? What happens if they don't? It has a Highlander feel to it -- kill other powerful beings and take their power. Are there other ways to gain power?

[SpazMan]

Thank you very much for taking a hard look at what I have been working on, these are the types of things that I need brought to my attention, it makes sense in my head, but that's about it.

You are right in my interpretation of “tasked based resolution”, I unaware that it was a often loaded phrase. I am aware of some of the problems that you are describing for this type of resolution, although I have personally not seen some of them in play myself. Like I mentioned, and from my experience, I find that in a conflict resolution (which might be another loaded term). Conflict resolution, as I use the term, is where a stake is set at the start of a conflict and through sequence play the conflict is resolved. My issue with this is only that I find that when a stake is set, that how it gets accomplished seams to get brushed aside. In a worst case, the a stake is won makes no sense to the fiction, or one side of the conflict has the advantage for part of the conflict but then looses because they ran out of dice for his pool.
I am very open to ideas to resolve the problem and find some type of middle for a resolution system.
In my mind the game does not focus on any particular goal as a straight conflict.
An example as I was doing an ad hawk play test of this with my local group. They were playing ice spirits, there ultimate goal was setting into motion a new ice age, many of their smaller goals were about subjecting this mountain village to a horrible blizzard, and winter problems. While ice age was not resolved in the time of the session, the degradation of the mountain village was what took the focus of most of the session. Each player played into that scene and added to the goal, by causing avalanches, starting a blizzard, or leading weak willed people to get lost in the snow.

As far as the dice pools, the “augmenting Modifiers" is just an added modifier, I need to change the wording on that (words that just cost too much). The concept behind having a variable pool and a static modifier was that to become the best, and be able to perform the hardest tasks for a particular task you need to both consider the pool of dice you have to get a good role, and to make sure that your modifier can hit the difficulty. The issue I can see about taking out a modifiers, is the “wiff factor” as you pointed out, those traitorous dice feel safe in large numbers and will destroy your roles.

Goals were not outlined in my notes yet. In short a Group Goal can be large or small, the idea is that it ties the group together and inspires a central theme or end to the scenario, when that goal is accomplished the game should end. Personal Goals are either big or small. Small goal should be a flag that this is not very important but something I want to accomplish in the span of a session or two. Defeating a rival Shard, or destroying a village would be prime examples. Larger Goals should be accomplishable, usually along a similar time as the group goal; it should be one of the last things done before a scenario is concluded. Turning London into a winter wonderland was a good big goal for one of the frost spirits.

"Accumulation of Power" / "Accomplishing goals" is another aspect that is not yet covered in my notes. In theory (and in slight practice), the two go hand in hand, as they get more power they are able to accomplish their goals. Which also answers the question about Crystal Points; they are the currency of the game. You get Crystal Points by fulfilling your Essence drive, but more largely you get it by killing / defeating other shards not of your Titan. This leads to after an encounter where one or more shards were, everyone who was involved with the conflict will receive Crystal Points from an accumulated pool. For an example, an encounter I had was 6 ice spirits (players) vs 3 angels. After the angels were dead 39 Crystal points were given to the players. So were dealing with a currency that comes in large quantities with the majority being spend immediately or quickly. To enforce a form of instant gratification (and to play into the Highlander theme) they may spend their points right after getting them, or at anytime they choose once they have them. Cost for mundane stats is 1 - 2, new powers are and knacks are 3, and essence is 5. Or at least those are the working numbers I have.

Does this make sense, and/or expand well on what I have already writen?

Thank you agian for taking a look at what I have been working on.

-Michael

[Sydney Freedberg]

Okay, so let me see if I've got this straight: All the player-characters are magically superpowered "shards" of the same Titan, fighting together against that Titan's foes -- chiefly, shards of other Titans. The more shards of enemy Titans you defeat, and the more powerful those defeated enemies were, the more powerful you become (getting Crystal points, chiefly), so you can defeat stronger enemies and become even more powerful in turn. Basically it's Highlander meets D&D meets World of Darkness, which is a cool combination.

If I'm reading you right, then what you've got going for you is a clear focus: It's not like D&D, where any "monster" will do for an enemy, because only rival shards are worthy foes from whose defeat you can gain power (this is the Highlander death-match element); and it's not like World of Darkness, where just living the life (or unlife) of a supernatural being is the point, and you can dabble in anything from vampire politics to werewolf ecoterrorism, because the whole game is focused on one form of interaction with other supernaturals, namely killing the crap out of them and draining their magic power (again, a la Highlander).

My first recommendation is that you don't try to imitate D&D or WoD by including rules for doing "anything you can imagine" because that ends up with you, the writer, doing a lot more work only to diffuse your focus. So your list of skills

Athletics
Awareness
Brawling
Deception
Endurance
Expression
Knowledge
Larceny
Marksmanship
Socialize
Stealth
Survival
Throwing
Weapons

is probably too long, while your section on "tricks"

Tricks are easy, they can fly, they breath fire, control the weather. Something like that.

is definitely too short. You could probably design this game have no "social" skills at all -- your players aren't here to chitchat and intrigue! They're here to kick ass and take heads! -- as long as you come up with a neat system for "design your own power." The critical, critical thing here is that it needs to be very clear to all the players and to the GM what a given power does in terms of (a) accomplishing Goals and (b) clobbering enemies. The downside of "task resolution," as a lot of people use the term, is that you end up with exchanges around the table like

Player: So I breathe fire on him!
GM: Cool! Roll!
Player: I totally succeeded! So what happens?
GM: Uh.... well... you breathed fire on him!
Player: Yeah, but does he die? Or run away? Or what?
GM: Uh.... [makes something up by pure fiat]
Player: [thinks GM is great if GM gave him what he wanted, otherwise whines and grumbles]

Your idea for "augmentating mundane skills" -- "Augmenting mundane can be done either by increasing a modifier by 2 or by adding 1 die to a particular pool." -- is a good place to start.

On a larger scale, you also want some kind of mechanics for achieving your Goal. How do you decide when the player-characters have destroyed a village? How do you decide when they've brought about a new ice age? I'd recommend that the village have some kind of "hit points" that the players can wear down by various "attacks," be they outright magical blasting or evil intrigue.

[SpazMan]

On a larger scale, you also want some kind of mechanics for achieving your Goal. How do you decide when the player-characters have destroyed a village? How do you decide when they've brought about a new ice age? I'd recommend that the village have some kind of "hit points" that the players can wear down by various "attacks," be they outright magical blasting or evil intrigue.

Sydney, I want to thank you for your suggestions. I read the rest of your post and am composing some of the other ideas that I have.

However I wanted to respond to this first cause it struck me as dead on, as something that needs to be done.
One of the things I am going to add to my notes is my thoughts on a the combat system. in which every target is a moderate (25) target to hit. Every Shard has 4 health boxes. If you get hit you mark off 1 health box. for every increment of 5 that they beat the difficulty by they remove an additional health box. From your comment it strikes me as a smart idea to have players set a stake / goals, and that stake/goal has health boxes (like a shard), with a similar mechanic, the better they do on any one roll the closer they get to accomplishing and completing their goal.

Thanks again.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of. Excellent.

[SpazMan]

So I have edited my notes on my blog.

However I have an issue now that I want some advice on, which is mostly directly referring to both Sydney and Adam’s comments about my talents and modifiers.

I have gotten some comments here and from other people that are looking at this game and a lot of people say the same thing about the skills and attributes.
That it’s; too clunky; inelegant; too complex; or too much for what I am trying to capture.
What are some good alternatives that people can think of to either replace the modifiers, or remove them? Hopefully without throwing the current system curve too into chaos (by which I mean not needing to start entirely from scratch). I am fine with heavily editing my current approach to the system. But I currently have no really good ideas of other things that I could use that would not be some riff directly from another game.

I am going to run a few play tests using the way it’s currently written, and if it still does not jive very well, I am just going to play around with the things I have, either removing the talents and only having attributes, or Vice Versa.

[Sydney Freedberg]

As I read the system right now, combat is pretty one-note: beat a 25 difficulty to do one point of damage, that's it. There's reference to using ranged weapons, spiritual vs. physical attacks, but it's not spelled out.

Since the fun part of this game is the fighting -- and even things that don't look like combat, e.g. spreading rumors and dissension in a village, are really all about taking away a target's "hit points" through non-physical means -- I think you should concentrate on different means of combat, ideally something that can bring "tricks" into the core mechanic rather than as add-ons.

So, for example, you could scrap your entire current skill list and give everyone stats in Physical Attack, Physical Defense, Spiritual Attack, Spiritual Defense, Social Attack, and Social Defense; "tricks" could simply become bonuses to various forms of Attack or Defense that only work in special situations (e.g. I can burrow underground; that's a penalty to anyone else's Physical Attack, but only if we're fighting on dirt, not rock or water). Instead of a flat 25 difficulty to-hit, you could make it an opposed roll, each side rolling its chosen form of Attack against the other's matching Defense, and if the Attack wins by a large margin, it could do more than one point of damage. I'd suggest making effects simultaneous, so you can have asymetrical duels: If you're trying to carve me up with a sword, and I'm just parrying while telling you how everything you've ever believed in is a lie, then you're making Physical Attack vs. my Physical Defense, but I'm making Social Attack vs. your Social Defense, and conceivably we could both succeed, so you stab me in the heart at the same moment that your heart breaks and you die of despair.

[SpazMan]

I really like that idea actually. I need to play around with how that would work with the rest of what I had writen.

In My Mind that might work best with a type of Script system. Each actor in a combat has two action, and they choose Attack or Defence for each. Action one take effect, then the second. If you defend during an attack, you can roll defence, if you don't defend during an attack, default 20 to hit.

I think that would be interesting.

[Sydney Freedberg]

There are all sorts of wrinkles you can add, absolutely -- say, a "tactics" roll that maneuvers the enemy into a situation where they can't use one kind of attack, for example.

If you're interested in scripted combat, you should check out Luke Crane's Burning Wheel. Jake Norwood's The Riddle of Steel has highly complex interacting maneuvers. Levi Kornelson's Cog Wars (available online somewhere for free) has a very abstract system that amounts to a five-element scissors-paper-stone.

[Sydney Freedberg]

P.S.: And I'd recommend checking out this thread -- http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=10977.0 -- where I asked for people to talk about their favorite unconventional combat systems and got some very interesting results.

[SpazMan]

I have been revising this idea off and on for the past few weeks (mostly off if truth be told). However I was struck with some inspiration, and now have a revised draft.

http://spazingames.blogspot.com/2007/07/shards-of-titans-revised-game-notes.html

Things I would like people to look at:
Does the system seam smother than the first draft? (see link in first post)
What are some pitfalls or problems that some people see with the current draft?