First Thoughts (oh, the irony) On A Setting & System

[Illetizgerg]

After lurking for a little while here and reading over some Indie RPGs I am really interested in designing my own system and corresponding setting and using that to start a game. Please let me know what you think of this. If you have any suggestions or recommended reading then I would be more than happy to hear them/it. Thanks!

Among other things, I would like to design something with a decided setting (as I will talk much about) and a well-rounded and easily predictable dice engine (for the sake of the GM). After buying and reading through "Dogs in the Vineyard" (which has been a terrific inspiration to me), I would also like a setting that contains the players, such that they all have a fairly simple unanimous goal, off of which other (personal) goals can sprout and develop. I am also working on incorporating elements of fear and secrecy into both the game and parts of the metagame, in order to bring the player's things not usually seen in RPGs.


Setting

The idea I have for a setting is a all-too-near-future game, in which the world is mostly deserted. Through some most-likely-apocalyptic event, the world's population is next to nothing (a-la motion picture "I Am Legend"), and there is no longer any structure in terms of life and culture. Furthermore, no one has any real idea of how things got to be the way they are, which adds an element of suspense, and has potential for a lot of plot twists during the course of the game. People live off the remnants of our abandoned civilization (a-la Australian teen TV drama "The Tribe"), with the smart one's attempting to harvest crops and develop cyclical resources.

Different cultures still exist, and all modern day languages are present. Cultural history is far from lost, and people can easily find information in libraries, however there isn't really any cultural pride or association. One of the biggest mysteries of the setting is the fact that there is no documentation of any events that led up to whatever cut the population down, and it has already been enough generations that any stories are more myth than fact.

Modern-day technology is available, however you can't exactly get gas for your car. Furthermore, most people have no idea how to operate any kind of technology, and advanced machines are commonly looked on as being supernatural and sometimes even demonic.

As I said, I was really amazed and inspired by the way that "Dogs in the Vineyard" handled the role of player characters, and I wanted to do something similar, yet unique. In particular, the idea of carrying mail struck a bizarre chord, and I wanted to build on that idea, though I'm not sure how far I really will.

The most notable group in the game is the Body of the Rose Garden, a governing body controlling the supposed paradise of the Rose Garden (Great Britain). The Body is incredibly large and has immense power through its people and familiarity with technology, however the severe lack of communication throughout the world means that few outside of the garden know about it. In order to remedy this there are many missionary settlements placed outside of the Rose Garden, spreading its influence and informing others of its existence.

While not religious, laws within the Body of the Rose Garden have a certain theological tone to them, and things are viewed as sins rather than as crimes. Unlike both religions and governments, however, the Body of the Rose Garden believes not in punishment, instruction, or correction, but rather in using every criminal as an example. Executions are carried out in particularly gruesome fashions, without trials. Potential criminals are "warned" for the purpose of discouragement through these sights of horror, carried out spontaneously whenever sin is observed by a member of the Obedient.

The player characters take on the role of Emissaries, missionary-esque travelers and makeshift peace-keepers from the Body. The main game will focus on the player's travel across North America (starting at a missionary camp on the east coast), as they attempt to bring the news of the Body's existence, and urge people to make the pilgrimage to paradise.

Through the twisted logic of the Body of the Rose Garden, Emissaries' primary job is the distribution of justice for the benefit of those "disturbed souls" living in chaos. Most settlements have no kind of law enforcement, thus bandits and other criminals roam freely, stealing and killing recklessly. Though not all Emissaries are trained in combat, they are expected to administer justice according to the standards of the Body. Though an average Emissary probably does not have the tenacity to gruesomely humiliate their victims in the same way as one of the Obedient, they are still often required to murder those who have done wrong. Furthermore, those knowledgeable of the Body may oppose the Emissaries, and doing so is also a deadly offense.


Player Roles

The one unique member of the party is the Obedient, and they are exactly that, incredibly loyal Emissaries, chosen specifically for the allegiance. They are not chosen for their skills in combat or ruthlessness of character, but after being chosen they are trained and their independence butchered. They are, however, placed in Emissary parties discretely, so no one in the party knows which one of them is the Obedient except for the Obedient themselves.

The process for choosing an Obedient is rather simple. Given something like five players, ten cards are chosen from a deck. One of them is designated as the Obedient card (for simplicity you could pick out one ace and have that be it), and two of them are secondary Obedient cards (like, for instance, two queens). Each player is then dealt two cards. The player with the Obedient card is an Obedient. If another player is dealt both of the secondary Obedient cards then they too are an Obedient, however they are not made aware of why, or the fact that there is another one in the party. You could also set it up that there was a cancellation card, and if a player draws both the Obedient card and the cancellation card then they do not become the Obedient, thus there could be one, two, or no Obedients in a party (it should really depend on the number of players in the game).

The idea is that the general flow of the game will slowly make the characters doubt their motivations and the Body, however there is always a certain fear that a lack of devotion could be punished by one of their own party members. I am not really familiar with any games that employ this kind of paranoia (other than two little one-shot games that one if my friends made), and I think it would be very interesting. The identity of the Obedient will eventually be revealed, however until that point I think it will be very interesting.


Dice Engine

I've been considering whether I want to use dice, cards, or both. In a weird way I would prefer to use dice for nostalgic reasons, but something like this might have a nice effect.

What I was thinking is having conflict play out where all contestants bid for something, like d10s. At the end the dice are rolled, and the person with the higher rolls wins. I think that would be interesting, because then you're competing in order to increase your statistical likelihood of winning. The problems is that I can't think of a way to do this that would still be simple and predictable. Maybe a system were you compete for point bonuses to a final die roll.

The one thing I would really like to do is design a system where stakes are decided based on the wants of both the players and the GM. If, for instance, a player attacks another character, that player decides the stakes. They could be "Until he's subdued", in which case the player would actually be subdued if they lost, or it could literally be "To the death", where one of the two characters will die at the end of the check. If it were something like "Until he's subdued" and one player wins then they can choose afterwards to step it up and go "To the death", however there would have to be some kind of obvious penalty to doing this instead of just going for it from the start. I don't want the system to be too open, however, so there would have to be a number of standards to direct play.

[Illetizgerg]

Also, had I realized that there was no post-editing I probably would have triple checked my post.

[FrankBrunner]

Bidding can be a fun mechanic, and it ties into the dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere I get a feeling of in your post-apocalyptic atmosphere. I like the societal amnesia and lack of records concerning the apocalypse, by the way. That lets the players and GM tailor the game to fit character backgrounds and story needs.

What do you see the characters bidding? They're bidding for bonuses or dice, but what do they put up as stakes in the bidding? Also, one thing to be careful of is that table-talk doesn't start focusing on the bidding (which is essentially a meta-game activity that takes people out of the fictional world) instead of on what characters are doing and what is actually occuring in the game world.

[Illetizgerg]

I was thinking of having player's base stats represented as chips, which are then used to bid or possibly even gamble. The problem is that I'm reluctant to really go into much depth with any of the ideas I have because they're so unpredictable. I'm sort of tired of games that are so random, and I would like at least the base statistics to be obvious for both the players and the GM.

[FrankBrunner]

Hm. So do you mean that you're not interested in going with any of the ideas that you have because the ideas all lead to mechanics with a lot of randomness? Or do you mean that the ideas are scattered all over the place and not organized yet? It's late and I'm probably just missing something here.

But if it's the former, you could do straight bidding with no randomness at all - or, at least, no dice. Whoever bids highest, wins. Whoever loses, loses the amount bid. So there is the randomness of not knowing how high your opponent will bid, but the result is pre-determined once the high bidder is known. For fun, you could have some (or all) of the bidding done in secret.

[Illetizgerg]

What I meant was that none of my ideas seemed like they'd be predictable enough, because the the randomness associated with the way things would have to be set up. After talking with my friends for a while I've decided not to go with a bidding system, and use a rather simple dice system. I'm sorry if I got your hopes up. ^_^

[Illetizgerg]

So I've resorted to an incredibly basic feeling d10 + mod system, where your roll is modified by your skill and your base stat. I find this simple, and anything else feels unnecessary and ultimately ineffective.

As far as combat goes, however, I've got a number of ideas (not all of which I feel totally comfortable posting). As far as actual attacks go, however, I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want. I've decided that the initial attack roll (to see if you hit) will be two opposing skill roles. The attacker will roll their weapon skill (which will be generalized by different kinds of weapons, i.e. archery, swordsmanship, marksmanship, etc), while the defender rolls their defense skill (generic stuff like Dodge). I wanted them done with skills this way because it makes it easy to have characters advance in hitting in a way identical to the way they advance in dodging.

The question is then how to handle damage. One thing I really want to do is have your damage tied directly to your prime physical stats, so as you take points of damage your stat bonuses decrease by the same amount (basically, your strength equivalent decreases by one point each time you take a point of damage). It then comes down to balancing damage in such a way that players can survive long enough, however things are still realistic.

[Mikael]

I do not really care for combat systems in general, but I do remember that it was kinda fun when we played old-school Traveller where you took the damage on your physical stats.

That said, why not mental stats as well? Or is that reserved for mental/social combat only?

Any which way, the rest of the system needs to support this, mainly in that there are not lots of derivative stats and other things you would need to recalculate based on the damage. In my opinion, even simple adding of bonuses to something else is bad enough.

[Illetizgerg]

I'm actually rather tired of games where there are tons of prime stats, so I've thought about doing three. The first would be a strength/endurance/fitness type one, the second would be awareness and perception, and the third would be your "social power" (called Influence). I intentionally do not want to include stats which dictate intelligence, although I will allow players to gain extra benefits by taking role-playing restrictions, some of which may deal with smarts.

I was thinking of having two kinds of HP equivalents. The first would be Blood, and taking damage to your blood would linearly decrease your fitness and awareness stats. The other HP, Clout (I was also thinking of Pride, but I like Clout better), governs your Influence in an identical way.

My group is a little weird. They seem to enjoy combat a lot (usually it's the highlight of the game), however they never really make their characters combat oriented. I believe it has to do with the way that most mainstream games only give character building benefits in combat situations, consequently there is a lot of psychological gratification. In any case, combat does factor into the setting.

I would like physical combat to have a social-analogue, because I've seen social conflicts bog down games before. It would give diplomats a bigger role than a lot of games I've played because skills like "Diplomacy" actually provide benefit (instead of the GM just saying that it doesn't matter, and the NPC holds their ground).

I'm trying to think of little ways where the overall system can be sped up through more psychological methods. For instance, most bonuses will be rather large compared to the die (if 5 is about the average prime stat, and 5 is a good skill, then a person who's trained will have a d10 + 10). In this case the d10 is usually the smaller number, and I've found that it is actually easier to add them if you think of it as 10 + d10, instead of starting for the varying d10 number and then counting up. This isn't very noticeable with 10 + d10, but consider something like 7 + d10. It seems sort of dorky, but it actually speeds things up quite a bit.

[greyorm]

Heya Greg, this setting sounds very evocative and interesting, but I wonder if thinking about combat might be putting the cart ahead of the horse. How do you plan to reinforce the paranoia, suspicion and party back-stabbing/adherence to the code that it looks like you want to be central or at least a big component of gameplay? How are you going to drive players, mechanically, to make those choices and worry about those issues?

[Illetizgerg]

Well, I'm not sure how well it came across in my posts here, but I've tried to separate my goals into two groups, the first being the core system, and the second being the content. There are things on both fronts that I would like to build new ideas into, however I don't really view either one as being more important. While it's true that the overall setting will probably influence the game much more, a solid framework that works independently of the setting can be used as the basis for any other games I make in the future.

As far as why I've been talking about damage and combat without fully establishing how metagame motivation will be synchronized with in-game motivation, the truth is I'm just not really sure what I want to do yet. You can be assured that I've been toying with many different ideas, however I'm hesitant to do anything drastic.

Because a recurring theme in the setting is abandonment and isolation, I was really planning on having the characters responsible for deciding how they wanted to approach their mission. If this were the case then I can imagine a lot of groups could encounter plenty of drama simply through the conflict of individual goals, however there is no guarantee. Still, forcing players to advance their characters along a two-way moral path isn't really what I was going for. You can be sure that I'm spending plenty of time thinking about it, though.

[greyorm]

As far as why I've been talking about damage and combat without fully establishing how metagame motivation will be synchronized with in-game motivation, the truth is I'm just not really sure what I want to do yet. You can be assured that I've been toying with many different ideas, however I'm hesitant to do anything drastic.

I hope it is cool to offer suggestions of how other games have taken a similar theme for you to look over for ideas and inspiration, so:

Of games I have played and recall working this way, I would suggest obtaining a copy of The Mountain Witch, and specifically looking over its Trust mechanics. Also, Paranoia would be another game to look into, which includes trust, betrayal, and hidden secrets as a big part of the situation the characters are in. I also suggest taking a look at my own game, ORX, as the mechanics and character resources naturally inspire the possibility of back-stabbing and party-conflict when life is on the line (and yet also engender a need for trust and cooperation).

I'm not saying "copy these games" by any means, but using their ideas and methods as a springboard for your own reference and development.