[Otherknight] Conflict in Conflict, I don´t know what to do

[soundmasterj]

A while ago, I wrote this game and I finally came around to playing it for the first time. Since the Forge helped me immensly in peparing the first drafts (shoutout to Tony LB and Valamir), I thought I´d come here with my first questions (see last few paragraphs).

A draft of the full "book", including fluff and megabytes of pictures, is here: http://mt11.quickshareit.com/share/20rules2408a7.pdf
Obviously, more is missing than already there.

Otherknight (working title) is a game about caring and killing. What does a knight care for so much, he will kill for it? Well, turns out, mostly women and his own skin, but thats fair I guess.

The game is Gm-less, with dice dictating who is the current "Lute-Bearer", ie, who has narrative authority. He may not disagree with something written on a character sheet or the world sheet (so if you want to never have someone beat your knight in battle, write down, "Sir Munchkin never loses a swordfight"). Dice may allow players to change those.
The current Lute-Bearer is encouraged to threaten destroying things in the world he belives the other players care about. When a player doesn´t want to let him do that, he may call for a Conflict about a so-called Bind, for example (the most trivial one): I am the Lute-Bearer. This Brigand will bash the knights brains in! You are this knight, you call for conflict, Bind: my body. Dice are thrown now and assigned to different slots, a lot like Otherkind: 1. for the Binds (are the Binds harmed or unharmed?),  2. for the Lute (narrative authority about the conflict and afterwards), 3. for the Mission (every knight chooses a mission at the start of the game and may come closer to solving it if a high die is put here).
When someone calls for conflict, he and the former Lute-Bearer (who created the setup by his threat) may get dice as reward. So go threaten, go care!

All together, there are 20 rules and I put them up here: http://mt11.quickshareit.com/share/20rulesonly7f631.pdf


The game should center around conflicts of loyalty; you got one high die and one low, but two Binds are in conflict- your king and your own honor. What do you choose?

And yesterday, I played it for the first time. I liked it a lot, but I got some questions. Here is what we did:

Characters
- My knight, Lord Biden, a grey knight out on his last adventure: finding a cure for his sick wife
- My friends knight, Sir Morten, a young and somewhat naive knight out for revenge: killing Sir Viggo, who threw Sir Mortens brother into a well bound

The game went quite well. In a memorable scene, the naive young knight Sir Morten got drunk with a Countess in enemy territory and both decided to do a race on her castles´ crenels. (I said), she says her brother died when he fell down here one night; well, the weak deaserve to die. I lost a brother, too, Sir Morten said. He didn´t deserve it. The countess laughs, (I said). She is going to give Sir Morten a kiss or a stroke at the breast, maybe he will fall down the walls or in love with her.
My friend of course called for conflict. She narrated her knight tumbling, but standing strong, winning the race, going to bed with the cruel countess. Afterwards, both cuddling it up, I narrated how the countess told about the last man to lay in this bed and what earned him the privilege: he gave her a ring he stole from a young man; and how he had thrown the young man into a well after he took his ring.
Sir Morten jumps to his sword, (I say,) and he will kill the countess who murdered his brother. My friend, Sir Mortens player, called for conflict about the Binds: the countess´ life and Sir Mortens life. Ok, I said, and offered her one of my "gift" dice. If you need this die in conflict, you kill an innocent person.
So Sir Morten went for his sword, naked, to slay the countess, naked, holding his dead brothers ring in her hands. The door opens and a servant enters. Sir Morten, still drunk, full of rage, having slept with his brothers murderer, reacts like an animal and strikes her dead. The servant girl falls to her knees, sword in her breast. Sir Morten lets go of the sword and throws the countess against a wall. "If he dies, he was too weak", the countess cries as he smashes her through the glass of her window. "No, it was you. You were too evil. That is all." And the cross of his sword in the dead servant girls breast casting his shadow over him, he has the heathen countess repent and swear to go to a monastery for her sins.
Afterwards, he becomes insane.

What mechanically happened was that she threw dice and put her high dice in both Binds, so she had to put a low die in the Lute/narrative authority - slot. I narrated how both survived, but at a high cost for those not protected by binds (the servant and Sir Mortens sanity).

I liked that a lot. My friend couldn´t speak for a while afterwards. She liked her knight a lot, I figured.

There were several problems though. One thing is, I don´t know how to solve the following dilemma: when you don´t want somebody to narrate something (for example, your knight being an asshole), write on your sheet at character creation: Sir Galahad is secure and gentle. If you don´t want somebody narrating something, but don´t have it written down, you call for conflict (for example, about your characters´ self esteem). But what if you don´t want somebody narrating something, but it already is a conflict? You can´t call for conflict in conflict.
I guess I could just say "aw shucks", if it´s not written down, the other players may narrate it however they want, so you better get dice so you may write it down... I don´t know.
For example, my friend didn´t want to have her knight kill the innocent person, but I made her character do it. It was fine, because the story was great; but she couldn´t have changed it (besides trying to convince me) if she wouldn´t have liked it.

Next thing is, I´m not sure how exactly I should set stakes. You call for conflict about a number of Binds. Should I maybe have the players decide up front what it would mean to put low dice in Bind slots?

Another thing is that we were sometimes unsure how to proceed: we didn´t know how to threaten a character so he had to cal for conflict. In the end, we got nice ideas every time, but maybe I could refine character creation for making it easier somehow.

We never had Favor increase or decrease in these rules. That was an idea of Valamir that I implemented; but I don´t know if it is working correctly now.

Also, I´d like to have rules for drawing the map (akin to how the world sheet is created), but I can´t think of any (each player draws a forrest, and a mountain and a castle. Now go! .... Sucks.)

If I get as usefull feedback for this as I got the first time around, I´ll be v. happy.

[Adrian F.]

You can´t call for conflict in conflict.

Why not?In your example you gained narrative control about the life of Sir Morten and the life of the countress and bought the death of a innocent with your gift dice everything else should be open for conflict.

[soundmasterj]

Well, we roll, I get narration rights for this conflict. I tell how my friends character kills an innocent person (my friend choose to have her do that by accepting my gift), how he saves his own live (my friend paid dice so I had to), how he thinks about killing the countess, how he masturbates over the corpse of the innocent servant. Fuck you, my friend says, I don´t want you to do that!
Aw shucks, I say, nowhere on your sheet does it say you don´t do that. I keep on narrating: the knight doesn´t kill the countess (she spent dice to have her survive).
Ok, everybody is save or dead, conflict is over, here, have your character back. Your character will masturbate onto the corpse again now. My friend calls for conflict and this time, her knight doesn´t do that, but it´s already happened once. I can´t imagine how her calling for conflict the first time around would work.

[soundmasterj]

Ok, it´s easy. I already have this distinction between "lute-bearer" (narrative authority outside of conflict) and "battle poet" (narratie authority inside conflict). What I´ll say is, lute-bearer may narrate anything, but may never disagree with something written on a sheet and players may call for conflict if he touches binds. Battle poet may narrate anything, but he must integrate what the conflict roll prescripes, he may not disagree with the sheet, and he may not include any binds not already in conflict unless that player agrees.

So, I got this bind on my knight, some player gets to narrate a conflict about another knight and some evil witch, he wants to narrate how the evil witch seduces my knight in this confict, I say, no or I say, go for it. He is, however, allowed to say how the witch seduces the knight already in conflict. If that knights player wouldn´t have wanted the other player to be able to do that, he shouldn´t have put this knight in conflict or shouldn´t have given the other player narrative rights.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Hi Jona

Nice pdf! (If you could make a plain version parallel to this one, it'd be easier on my printer and my pdf-viewer who is a bit buggy when it comes to complex layout).

I think you've nailed the problem yourself. There's a negotiation about specific results and then someone has to narrate them, plus other stuff (remaining in scope with the conflict). Doing a conflict about the conflict seems to take out a lot of the mechanic's punch.

From my point of view, yeah, a drunken knight, who just fucked the murderer of his beloved brother and realized it only after, could very well kill the first person to cross his path and masturbate over the corpse as a brutish sign of domination. It so happened that you negotiated that the countess should survive and that an innocent should die in her place, which makes it even more awful!
This makes me think of Dust Devil, where a similar mechanic is implemented. I haven't yet played it, but from what I hear on the Forge, the game works very well (perhaps somebody already pointed this out.)

What you might want to take into account is a concept called Lines & Veils (detailed in Ron Edwards's Sex & Sorcery supplement for Sorcerer). There are some subjects that will just hurt people at the table. Leave those out, draw a line, period. Others are okay if suggested, but let's be light on the explicitness, that's where we pull the veil.

I guess that this knight's macho and gruesome behaviour falls under a discussion of Lines & Veils and that your mechanic is perfectly sound in principle. This is of course if you want protagonists to reveal their ugly sides (and that you are okay to leave this in the hands of the whole group instead of just yourself). I like.

[soundmasterj]

I made this for a friend who´s 2 GB of ram couldn´t handle a handfull of medieval pictures:
http://mt11.quickshareit.com/share/20rulesb805c9.pdf
It´s all black and white and should be a lot easier on your printer. I definitely have do it in another layout because writing this way isn´t sane at all; but layouting is fun!

Well, I didn´t mean someone narrating something to explicit, to under-the-skin. We had that kind of situation, too: my friend wanted to tell me exactly HOW her knight had sex with the countess (she liked the countess, too) and told her to cut the pornography short because it made me nervous. So that´s what she did (making me nervous, not cutting it short...). What I meant was I don´t want somebody narrating something disagreeing with the owners´ understanding of his character. Say, my friend thinks her knight is nice and sweet, but nowhere on her sheet it´s written down like that and I gain narration rights and narrate her knight insulting monks and nuns. Or my friend thinks her knight is basically sane and I narrate him masturbating on corpses (I didn´t do that, of course). That´s not what this game should be about. An example from actual play: she didn´t write down anything about her characters´ religion and I narrated him as being , as I imagined all knights to be, christian. She didn´t like that too much, but there was nothing she could do.

(It wasn´t exactly macho behaviour on part of the knight, he was horribly afraid and ashamed of himself. But next game, I´ll definitely make a macho knight, thanks for that idea. I guess that´s a pretty huge target sign and I´ll constantly get my ass kicked by tough women the other players make up.)

Thank you for your comments and making me think someone might actually care enough about my skeleton of a game to print it out! If you were maybe interested in playtesting it, I´d like to maybe in a few weeks send you a more filled-out copy (I´d need to know how somebody plays it when I´m not around to tell him how it goes).

[Christoph Boeckle]

Hi

I won't make a promise I can't hold: I will probably not have the time to test the game in the near future and that's probably a problem seeing how advanced it is. But I can spend some time hashing out a few concepts.

The white .pdf has the same problems as the coloured one: my pdf software won't read it properly (I use Evince on Ubuntu, it's not as powerful as Acrobat Reader). I might print it out in the next few days though.

Regarding the issue of the owner's understanding of his character. With the mechanic you suggest, I'm not sure you can guarantee such a thing. After all, a character exists only insofar as it's actions have been established in play. What one might think of it is not shared, thus it does not exist in the roleplaying experience. Your game sounds like nobody can have absolute certainty on who their character is, although they surely know a bit more than others. Bug or feature?
If it's a feature, then you don't need to worry about other people's understanding of the character, as long as you respect the characters' integrity (this linked discussion happened a while ago, some of it might not be relevant here, but the basic idea might be interesting). This is where your system and past events have a role to play. Also note that there's always a number of ways to justify a given fact in the fiction, I'm not saying that character integrity should mean "we all agree that this is how the character is", but "this character can be like this, and in fact, that's how he is going to be, whether everyone likes it or not".

A thing I have toyed with in an old design was to let other players dictate actions for other people's characters, but not internal motivations nor states of mind (that was always up to the "main player").

Do you want a game as harsh as it seems to be now? I find it interesting, at least as a concept (my interests have indeed recently turned to such concepts lately with Dust Devils by Matt Snyder for example)


By the way, I like the idea of putting dice in different "resources", have you played board-games like Caylus, Agricola or The Game of Throne? I find it reminiscent of mechanics these games feature, while being very well adapted to an RPG.

[soundmasterj]

I created the first draft of Knights on a kubuntu laptop and couldn´t get the .pdfs to display correctly, there, too... Sucks. I could do .jpegs or something

Concerning loss of character ownership-
Intuitively, I´d go for "bug", but remembering how the actual play went, I´d say feature: I made her knight go mad, she made my knight betray his wife and I loved both, even though I would never have my knight do that or she hers. So I say, it´s great (especially as you always have a chocie of giving up authority or keeping it; you enter conflict, you are up for grabs, and after all, the games premise is; what will loyalty to one person (or caring for the knight himself) cost another person he is loyal to (or himself)? - and others will always make you pay more than you would yourself.)
Actually, there is a rule how if you put a 1 in the Lute slot (narr. auth.), the player that made you enter conflict may narrate as well as change or add a sentence to your sheet (the sheet may seldomly changed). So I kind of anticipated this already, even though you are just making it explicit for me what I´m doing.
We actually used that rule in game. I always played my character kind of grumpy and she put on my sheet how he was grumpy and mean because as a kid, he was short and suffered from the smallpox and its scars. I didn´t like that at first, but now, when I think of that knight, he´s small and scared. I think I even used that to intimidate someone later on, even though I protested when she made it up in the first place.
Well, I´ll read Vincents´ thoughts on the matter tomorrow. For now, I love how radical it is.

If by "dice in ressources" you mean, assigning dice to different slots, well, that´s Vincents´ Otherkind. If you mean giving not Mission Points but Mission Dice, well, I just hate writing numbers down in RPGs. I don´t know if you play DSA in Switzerland (here in Germany, we do), but I always hated how my "Heldenprotokoll" looked like nothing but dirt and rubber. Also, everbody can see dice immediately and there is no cheating
So, I never played those board games.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Otherknight (working title) is a game about caring and killing. What does a knight care for so much, he will kill for it? Well, turns out, mostly women and his own skin, but thats fair I guess.

And

The game should center around conflicts of loyalty; you got one high die and one low, but two Binds are in conflict- your king and your own honor. What do you choose?

Nifty! I'd say that's a pretty powerful starting point. Are you familiar with The Riddle of Steel? How about Pendragon? I ask because those are pretty much the go-to games for innovative mechanics concerning such decisions, and because, as I see it, they also represent disparate Creative Agendas. Your game is structurally extremely different, but I think it's good to know what's gone before.

I really like the Malory feel in your account of play, in which sex, stupid-exciting risk, murder in the past, and fast decisions in the present are all mixed up together. I'd really like to see it in action with multiple players. One of the games that influenced early discussions is called Soap. (It's currently available in, as I see it, somewhat compromised form here; you can read the Forge review of the original game.) Although not always, most of the time, Soap yielded incredibly active, topsy-turvy, yet ultimately logical (or at least continuity-preserving) mayhem. I'm getting the idea that Otherknight might be a worthy heir.

... what if you don´t want somebody narrating something, but it already is a conflict? You can´t call for conflict in conflict.
I guess I could just say "aw shucks", if it´s not written down, the other players may narrate it however they want, so you better get dice so you may write it down... I don´t know.
For example, my friend didn´t want to have her knight kill the innocent person, but I made her character do it. It was fine, because the story was great; but she couldn´t have changed it (besides trying to convince me) if she wouldn´t have liked it.

The solution is to acknowledge certain statements as provisional narration, and limit them to actions rather than internal states and specific outcomes. In this case, the question of killing the servant would indeed be a conflict of its own. In that case, you could well have narrated that Sir Morten raised his sword to strike her, but we'd have to find out whether he actually does it (note that the roll is not merely about whether he wants to, but rather whether he does it). That is, in this case, because the player presumably does not say, "Yeah, he kills the servant" which means no roll is necessary.

Would that be OK? If I understand it correctly, it'd be handled sequentially, prior to the next "move" on the wicked lady.

Just in case, I'm not understanding ... is the issue that the other player had already stated conflict-conditions before you brought in the servant woman? If so, then the problem is not anything to do with the system, but rather that you steamrolled the conflict-in-action by bringing in more complications.

Perhaps, in that case, it would be good to permit "complicating" a conflict after its first conditions are out in the open, prior to final resolution.

As you can see, I'm not 100% clear on the question, so maybe the first step is ironing that out for me.

As a slightly more general point, I suggest that your word-usage for when to roll the dice is tripping you up. Instead of the dice being about what individual players want to happen, they should be used when one or more players want the dice to say what happens. That's a huge difference. It means the dice are about accepting and enjoying randomized outcomes at particular points of play, rather than a struggle over who gets to tell a story. (I just had a very fruitful discussion with Jared Sorensen about the Darkpages ashcan, so this issue is fresh in my mind right now.)

Next thing is, I´m not sure how exactly I should set stakes. You call for conflict about a number of Binds. Should I maybe have the players decide up front what it would mean to put low dice in Bind slots?

Eeesh. First advice: abandon any and all notions you've picked up about "setting stakes." That's been a blind alley of bad design for about three years now. You're doing great as long as we're talking about character actions, actions-in-progress, and the knowledge that the resolution mechanics are to be treated as genuinely consequential.

Now for the specific application. It's true that when a player puts dice into Bind slots (high or low), he or she must have a strong idea of what the knight is intending to do. But exactly how that affects the Bind NPCs, depending on which way the dice go, is often best handled in a before-and-after fashion. Before the dice are rolled, all we need to know is that the NPC could be affected, and if necessary, some narration can be used to cement the current events' capability of affecting him or her. But that's not the same as stating exactly what those effects will be as a pre-narration - we're just making sure that we don't have to concoct an elaborate justification. So if the dice turn out in such a way that the Bond NPC is affected, well then, here's the "after" part, in which it's narrated exactly how. But not until then.

I am willing to stand by this advice with all the weight of my play-experience and consideration of how role-playing works. I didn't make it up off-the-cuff. Try it as I described and see what you think.

Another thing is that we were sometimes unsure how to proceed: we didn´t know how to threaten a character so he had to cal for conflict. In the end, we got nice ideas every time, but maybe I could refine character creation for making it easier somehow.

I'm suspecting this is a matter of practice; also, if my experienes with Soap are a guide, then having three or more people at the table creates a different and more reliable situation-creation atmosphere. It actually happens in two ways, so we can talk about that if you want.

My advice is to keep playtesting, and if and when you get good at this part of play, then write down what the hell you're doing and use that as instructions.

Also, I´d like to have rules for drawing the map (akin to how the world sheet is created), but I can´t think of any (each player draws a forrest, and a mountain and a castle. Now go! .... Sucks.)

That sucks? To the contrary, that can be really cool. I am not sure whether the map tiles that John Harper and Tony Dowler developed for John's game Stranger Things are still available on-line, but you should see'em. They work great.

Best, Ron

[soundmasterj]

I think what I did wrong in this playtest report was worrying too much about what MIGHT go wrong because actually, everything worked out just fine, it´s just that I was worried, next time it wouldn´t.

Mr. Edwards.,
I skimmed over TRoS and said thanks, but no, thanks because of the high handling time of combat. It looks really, really good, but I´m lazy and don´t care much for rules resembling physics in the slightest (Shadowrun raped my inner sim and now it suffers from PTSD and makes me run away from attributes like "Agility"). I know about spiritual attributes though and distinctly remember Pendragon being some game where there where were spiritual attributes, too - you had to roll under them to not act immorally or something? I interpret TRoS ´SAs as some kind of flag. However, how would they reinforce conflicting drives? Wouldn´t the most efficient (and according to your review, necessary) use be in having them mostly aligned, thereby evading conflicts between SAs?
What I greatly enjoy is the idea of SA + full-on director stance, ie., one of my spiritual attributes is "lose in battle for a woman I love". Now I am more or less forced to constantly throw epic obstacles at me to NOT die. I like that a lot. Self-created adversary may be the best kind.
Over here in Germany, the primary RPG system is some D&D-reinterpreted by sim - piece of stupid called DSA. Here, every character has 14 attributes, 7 good, 7 bad. GM may call for a check on these. If failed, you give in to greed or a fit of temper or, well, fear of heights.
I guess one might laugh now. No disrespect to sim players, but I am not one of you!

I never thought about this game being kind of soap-like, but when reading the review, I immediately get what you mean. Yes, the resemblance is more than scary.

Concerning setting stakes: what I noticed is that we had, as players, the tendency to put low dice into Bind slots and use high dice for narration rights, and in narration marginalizing the "bad thing" to happen to the binds. Actually, you got fucked over if you gave up narration rights, not if you gave up on binds. Since what was actually the most important and fun thing was getting fucked over, it still worked out, but I thought maybe setting stakes could help here. What the text currently reads is approximately: When initiating conflict, the former Lute-Bearer may (but does not have to) declare how exactly the Bind is threatened. If a low dice is assigned to the Bind, the Battle-Poet has to integrate those threats into narration.
Well, I would trust you, but giving players more options to fuck each other over sounds seductive. Without further input, that´s how I will try it next time. If it shouldn´t work, I´ll revert to no prescribed stakes because I gladly bow to superior experience.

Concerning lack of clear character ownership: besides the reformulations I implemented in reaction to Christoph, I will consider setting clearer restrictions to the reach of one singular conflict. That´s another problem we had: when does conflict actually end? I thought setting clearer stakes would prevent that, too.
In the example case, she actually would have had to narrate the death of an innocent, too, because she accepted my gift die bound to that detail. It´s just that she could have made it more of an accident, whereas I made it happen out of temporary madness. But that´s exactly as it should be, I guess. We immensly enjoyed it how it went.

Concerning more players creating more opportunity for threats: Yes, that sounds about right. My timeline is "playtesting with three or more players in two weeks". Also, I once again found some piece of advice by Vincent Baker concerning the subject:
God Sex Art Money Violence
So now, I am writing a few words about how to make someone care about something and throwing one of those at it.

Concerning maps: I found Tony Dowlers flickr-posted tiles and am now reading up on kidnapping. Suggestions on how to kidnap artists w/o damaging artistic capabilities would be greatly appreciated.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Just a quick passage, I'll come around again to this thread when I've read that pdf you sent me.

Maps and tiles? YES!

And a thousand times yes to Ron's "describe actions, not internal states"! I was talking about that with a friend yesterday evening and forgot to suggest that to you. I use it very frequently in games where characters are controlled by more than one player at different times and it's quite the good rule to retain a sense of continuity. Acts can often be justified in various ways.

[soundmasterj]

I just found out how I actually wrote rules for providing kickers, bangs and flags and I didn´t even KNOW. (Mission = Kicker, Threatening = Bang, Binds = Flags)

[Valamir]

For the interested, here are some links to those older Otherknight threads.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18858.0

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18858.0


Also, don't worry too much about the stakes setting thing.  Ron's rant is a personal preference masquerading as a design principle...quite forgivable as he does this less than most anyone else I know, but it's really just a peculiar bugaboo of his that he's been on about for a couple years now.

If you find it works in your game to set stakes in "this is what happens if I win" fashion...great go with it.
If you find it doesn't...also great, go with something else.  Its ultimately just a technique no better or worse than "roll for initiative" or "The Lute-Bearer has authority to decide".  Some techniques work great for certain goals in certain games while working horribly for different goals in other games.  Go with what works.

[soundmasterj]

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18887.0

Concerning the stakes-controversy: Sometimes I wish there were some hard-and-fast rules stating what techniques are bad, which good (CR good, TR bad! Stance X good, Stance Y bad!). On the other hand, that would take the fun out of designing.

[soundmasterj]

Also, I did the second playtest yesterday. It didn´t go half as good as the last one (mostly because SOMEONES´ pet rat decided to catch a cold or something and we had to cut it in the middle), but it was nice. The new dice I made up (OtherKnight: now stealing less from Otherkind than ever before!) worked superb, enabling players to really make their own choices.
Again, we had the problem of not knowing how to threaten; why? Well...
The setting was "The kings´ knights, the Sea Dragons, patrol the river bordering between the land of the king and the land of the undead." Of course, the undead country looking hella interesting, that´s were we went, and suddenly there was noone to protect and we had a hard time calling for conflict. A knight surrounded by undead, that´s not a tough situation obviously... he just starts a-hacking. So for now I´ll concentrate on setting and making sure the various "bangs" and "kickers" and "flags" actually work by looking intensly at preparation (world - & character creation). What exactly should a Bind/Oath be, what should a Mission be, how to threaten, what to call conflict over.