Misunderstood: The RPG

[jburneko]

So the other day, Mr. Joshua Bishop-Roby described by design aesthetic as "Emo-Punk."  While it's true I like my games emotionally bleak and taxing and I don't think of them as "Emo."  "Emo" to me carries with it a slight connotation of self-inflicted disingenuous angst.  So I retorted casually that I was going to design and "Emo-Punk" game just to show him the difference.

Then inspiration struck.  Inspiration that wouldn't let go.  So in a few hours I banged out:

Misunderstood: The RPG of Friendship Against the Harsh Cruel World

My thoughts:

1) I've grown really fond of this game.  I have a lot of sympathy for the characters it's about and really want to see them succeed and salvage their friendships.  I showed it to Joshua and he brought up the example of the "furry" trying to explain to his parents why he needed a fur suit.  That's pretty much stuck in my head since then.  It's perfect.

2) I really want the game to be about the tension of being a safe "loner" (Taking on the World Scenes) and the more rewarding but also more complex route of tackling life together as friends (Friendship Scenes).  Defeating The Harsh Cruel World should be harder than having the friends simply dissolve because they can't deal with each others' bullshit.

3) In reference to number two above my big fear with the current design is that Friendship Score don't matter enough.  It took two tries to get Friendship Scenes to produce the Diplomacy-esq co-operate or betray mechanic right and I think they currently works as intended but only if you care about Friendship Points.  Outreach scenes are currently in the same boat.  Would anyone do an Outreach scene if they didn't have to?

4) Part of me wants a mechanic where the player actually declares, "I'm so misunderstood!" and then does something mechanically drastic... but I don't know what.  My current crude thoughts are that they return half their Understanding points to The Cruel Harsh World to refresh all their Friendship Points.  But again,  I don't know if Friendship Points matter that much.  I also don't know if this is overkill possibly removing all subtlety from the game.

5) Ultimately I think this would make a nice little pamphlet game.  The kind of think you pick up for 3-5 dollars.

Feedback would be greatly welcome and I'd be honored if anyone actually took the time to play it.

Jesse

[Adam Dray]

(I'm always of two minds about linking out to other message boards with posts. It discourages people from clicking through to read the other post, so you get less attention. It encourages people to respond on the blog or other board, so you get less attention here, and the Forge draws a different crowd than, say, LiveJournal. Just a pointer: for short ideas like your game rules, you might consider posting the entire text here.)

My thoughts on Misunderstood:

The "play starts with highest Empathy" rule seems unnecessary. Not only do you have to have all these rules for tie-breaking, you end up falling back on what ought to have been the rule in the first place: first turn goes to whomever will take on the most dice in their scene. That, there, is a fucking awesome, emo-building rule. I recommend calling those dice "Pain." No one has more Pain than I do! Just change the turn-order rules with a bidding mechanism. Everyone grabs a big fucking pile of Pain dice out of the Harsh Cruel World and sets it in front of them. Go in order of Pain dice.

I think the counting rule will add unnecessary handling time to play. I can see that you'd want to sorta randomize who will play your adversity though. Why not let everyone get involved? If no one volunteers, just let the player choose -- the player is free to choose by rolling a die and counting or something, if they refuse to just pick someone.

I do not understand the point of counting 6's as 0. My Life with Master does something similar (counts 4's on a d4 as 0) and this greatly speeds up handling time, believe it or not, but that's because adding 0, 1, 2, and 3 seems to be much easier than 1-4 (you discard 25% of the dice). I think the speed-up decreases with the number of faces so you get less benefit on a d6 (you discard 17% of the dice).

(I assume from the max-as-zero rule plus other design choices that MLwM was a strong influence on your game?)

I'd like to see the rules say what "respond with Empathy, Sympathy or Sociopathy" really means. Is this left to the group to decide or do these terms have definitions in the game? (Oh, I see you sorta defined these later in the Venting Mode section.)

I like the reward system. Play it out and let me know how it works!  Your post makes it sound like you've played it though; post in AP!

Can you throw your friends under the bus (give up Friend points) to win conflicts? That's very high school and I'd love to see it in the game.

For your "I'm So Misunderstood" mechanic, how would that work? Is it a once-per-game kind of thing? Perhaps it lets you shift a point permanently from one attribute to another (say, from Empathy to Sociopathy, or any other combo). The idea is that you are not what everyone thought you were, and now your stats change to show that.

[jburneko]

Hey!  Thanks for the feedback!

Regarding posting the link.  I reviewed the sticky at the top of the forum and the rules specifically mention NOT posting the text and just providing a link.  But perhaps Misunderstood is short enough that, that wasn't necessary.

Huh, just going with straight bidding for the turn order is an interesting idea.  I will definitely take that under serious advisement.

The counting rule is there because I wanted players to be able to literally pick their adversity at both a mechanics AND a social level.  The mechanics level is obvious because the number of dice you pull is what you roll against.  However consider this at the social level: I pull four dice and count over four players and that turns out to be Joe.  But Joe's been mumbling unkind things about my character and what I've been up to.  I don't want Joe setting my adversity.  But that means I either have to go up to 5 dice and take on more risk or go down to 3 dice and score less points.

Regarding sixes as zeros.  Yes, I borrowed this from My Life with Master.  I'm a HUGE My Life with Master fan and A LOT of my designs borrow many of the ideas.  Counting the highest die as zero isn't about handling time though, it's about squishing the probability curve to give the underdog a larger chance.  A player who rolls a maximum value of 5 on a single die has only a 15 in 36 chance of being beaten by 2d6 with the zero rule.  A player who rolls a maximum value of 6 on a single die has a 21 in 36 chance of being beaten on 2d6 without the zero rule.  It encourages taking on more of The Harsh Cruel World at a time.

I agree the text is a little unclear on Empathy, Sympathy and Sociopathy but it's just a sketchy alpha text by no means am I under the delusion that this is anywhere NEAR complete.  In general Emapthy is both understanding what another character is feeling and knowing why he has those feelings.  Sympathy is understanding what another character is feeling but being confused on why they feel that way.  Sociopathy is just total emotional disconnect between your character and another.

No, I haven't played it.  I'd like to.  My assertions are mostly through thoughtful analysis about what I'm trying to give incentives for at each point in the game.

The only scene you can really betray your friends in is the Friendship scene which is more or less what I wanted.  Taking on the World alone is safer (set your own adversity, pick your own score, pure odds, no complications) but tackling problems with your friends is more rewarding but riskier (your score + their friendships means you can beat more dice which you share but they can also turn on you and try to grab all the dice for themselves).

I imagine that "I'm so Misunderstood" would be a "a skip your turn" kind of thing.  Maybe to get out of a risky Outreach scene or avoid the disastrous end-game condition.  I actually had considered the stat shuffling option but like my concern about Friendship points I don't know if the content of the game would ever get you to care about suddenly wanting to be more Empathetic or whatever enough to exercise the option.

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Jesse

[Adam Dray]

I don't like the counting rule. You have a couple different forces at play here.

1. You want a mechanic that makes players weigh at-the-table social factors against in-the-game (but not in-the-fiction) tactical factors.

2. You want a mechanic that will encourage players to pull in adversity from other players who might hit hard. But your encouragement is only a shift of 2 points on average (one die); big whoop.

3. But, very importantly, you want to make sure the love gets spread around the table. You want everyone to be busy or think that -- at any time now -- they could be called upon to take part in a scene. If Bob doesn't bring the A-game, then people will start avoiding him because they want the good stuff. They may even crave the really hard adversity, so certain players will get chosen all the time and the other players will sit on their asses.

So I think it's important to randomize who plays adversity to keep the table busy. Then again, Roach has a "pick someone" and it seems to play fine, so who knows. You can combine your ideas with mine, I think. Select a player at random via a die roll, then let the acting player shift it to the left or right at a huge cost (2-3 dice).


I still don't get what you're saying about sixes-as-zeros. The distribution curve for 1d6 is the same as the distribution for 1d6-1, just shifted down 1 point. The distribution curve for 5d6 is the same as the distribution for 5(d6-1), just shifted down 5 points. The probabilities don't change. The ranges change.


Who determines whether someone is playing up their Empathy, Sympathy, or Sociopathy properly? Is it "any player can veto" like in Dogs in the Vineyard? I think MLwM's Sincerity rules are the same -- any player can call bullshit.


I think you should be able to betray your friends at any point in the game, but I'm high-drama like that. Imagine yourself in a Taking on the World scene. You're trying to get the popular girl to notice you and not make fun of you as you play chess with your friend. Looking at the dice, you realize you're probably gonna lose the conflict. You point at your friend and make fun of him in front of her and she laughs. You decrement your Friend score by 1 and take another 1d6 to roll. (I'm realizing that your currency scores might be a little low to make some of these dice-to-score 1:1 conversions work nicely. I'd like to see Friend scores in the 3-6 range to be able to (un)comfortably suck dice from them 1:1 for conflicts.)


Yuck on the "skip your turn" thing for I'm So Misunderstood. Skipping your turn is unfun. Being So Misunderstood should be extra fun. Just make it something you can do only once per game or trigger it in some other rarely occurring way, and it'll be fine.