What's in a name?

[JoyWriter]

Don't forget that if you really want to combine stats, influence and power could be combined.

This can either be done through associating both with "strength of spirit", or even by adding a interpersonal element to the magic system, like talking to the wind.

If you do this, the only stat without an associated reaction will be grace. In other words characters who focus primarily on being graceful will be more fragile. Now you might be fine with this, or you might make grace the stat of D&D style "armour class".


Sounds symmetrical and straightforward yes, but if you do this, bear in mind that it could result in "roll your highest stat vs their highest stat". In terms of strategy, that makes the stat labels irrelevant, and opens up the possibility of arbitrary stats, with yours as the standard ones. How do you avoid this interchangeability, assuming you want to? Make some defences work better against different things. D&D 4e takes this to extremes by allowing you to only use specific defences against certain attacks, you could shift from that by giving bonuses to the rolls vs certain kinds of attacks etc. This half-way position allows more "easy bad choices", in terms of sub-optimum responses, so I'd rather make things more interesting by shifting consequences rather than bonuses.

If that's too much of a jump in logic, suppose someone tries to defy a sword attack; they stare down the person striking to make him loose his nerve. If it is just a "-5 for inappropriate defence", then all the player will do is calculate what stat difference makes it more efficient to stick with your favoured defence. But what if on success the person must shake off the influence in order to attack again, but on failure they take double damage, or are themselves stunned by the action. That kind of thing creates a distinct difference between responses, one that is more qualitative and hopefully, more illustrative of the differences between the various defences.

[Morgan Coldsoul]

I think I'm probably satisfied with five statistics; I'm really liking the way that Vitality, Grace, Wits, Influence, and Power look together on a character sheet. An interesting idea, though I personally think that there's too much of a difference between Influence and Power to really combine them. Strength and Endurance are going together very well, however. Thanks a lot to 7VII7 for that suggestion.

On the other hand, I'm definitely interested in this idea of shifting consequences. After reading your idea, I've been trying to organize this into a chart (some things it's all right to ad hoc, other things, I feel, just need a chart) and am finally making some headway. What about combining the two examples you gave? If the response is inappropriate to the situation, a penalty is assessed, but players are still encouraged to try it out if it works for them because it can have significant impact upon the game? Returning to your own example, defying a critical hit or similar from a sword would suffer a -5 or higher penalty on the roll, being mismatched to the situation, but if the character succeeded in spite of that penalty, then the opponent would be stunned for a round or possibly frightened; on a failure, the character would suffer maximum critical damage or double damage for making an inappropriate response.

I have to admit that the first time I read through that example, it sounded a little odd, and I couldn't really see it playing out well in my head, but I wanted to give it some more thought before dismissing your suggestion out of hand (hence the long wait before replying). In the interval, I've come to kind of like this concept, and I think it adds not only flexibility, but new depth to the game. Thanks a lot, JoyWriter.

Here's an example of the chart that I'm working on:

[JoyWriter]

That matches up to my first idea, where you can imagine the different defences as being like archery targets; there's the middle bullseye where they work really well, that +x, the main region they defend against, the +0, and the outer regions, like the -5 and -10, that are like the low scoring edges, or like the penumbra of the moons shadow, or the edges of compression around a foundation. If that seems strangely all encompassing, I'm talking about fuzzy sets, influence factors, all that business.

Imagine those archery targets as contours on a map, and then add the bonus to the height of that hill. Then you have a landscape of defence strength, where the inappropriate for one defence may overlap with the appropriate for another. Now one of those hills, if it gets big enough, could dwarf all of those other hills, making them irrelevant as defences, and this would happen when it's associated stat gets 10 bigger than all the others.

Now I'm not sure if this visualisation is helping or hindering, so I won't push it!

The big tricks to avoid power gamers (or anyone with a tactical itch they can't ignore) just maxing one stat and going "25 -10 > 8, I guess I'll just defy again", is to make it not just about the defence number, but the consequence. Make that last column of your table a thing people consider, and shape their actions according to that logic. Now this is just my last few paragraphs expanded, glad you like the idea!

So your big objective now will probably be to fill in that table; replace "appropriate" by descriptions that actually tell players what kind of situation it is designed to apply to, and what is a very unusual example of using it. Then you could fill in the benefit/penalty.

For example, I'd probably say that to act as incentive to using more appropriate stuff, people could get the bonus side of the effect on "critical", and the negative for inappropriate use on any fail. This also means that in "normal use", defying someone's attempt to intimidate you is just a failure for them, but on a critical not only do they fail to intimidate you, they have to shake off that influence before they can attempt it again.

Notice that I used the same mechanism I suggested for damage to intimidation. The game will be even more elegant (and likely awesome), if you can go through situations of how you imagine people using these abilities, and find ways to match up the bonuses and weaknesses to the same mechanism. That way people will know what happens when you defy something and it goes wrong; "do your worst!" "ok I will, fsshing" or if you "over-react" when using react inappropriately etc. If you can get that last column of the table to look mostly the same but behave differently in those different situations, then you'll be golden!

[Morgan Coldsoul]

Hmm; I see what you're saying. Here's an idea: Do you think that it would be more appropriate to (as in your example) reward a success with an inappropriate response, in spite of a penalty, with simple failure on the part of the opponent, and a critical success with added benefit; or, to say that an inappropriate response only works if it is a critical success? For instance, you may attempt to defy poisoning (mind over matter) all you like, but because it is an inappropriate response (you should really shrug poison off), then you can only successfully do so on a critically successfull defy roll. However, if you manage it, then you respond spectacularly as opposed to typically.

To me, this seems a slightly more self-limiting system; players will be less likely to attempt it unless circumstances are dire, since they have only the slightest chance of succeeding. In order to get a critical success, after all, you would have to beat the Response Factor of the obstacle by [insert arbitrary number here].      The self-limiting aspect is important because there are certain things in the world it doesn't really make good sense to respond inappropriately to (and some things you cannot respond inappropriately to at all, such as defying falling damage or reacting to a death spell), and characters shouldn't be able to go around defying poison all the time, willy-nilly. But there should always be a glimmer of chance that, in a tough moment, they might. To represent that, we've had this rule built into the system for some time:

Extreme Effort: Once per adventure, any heroic character (that is, anyone with levels in something other than the NPC class or a monster class) may add their level to any dice roll they make, as a part of the same action required to execute the dice roll. If they successfully apply extreme effort to a truly heroic or "cinematic" roll (and survive), they may gain another use of extreme effort for this adventure, at the Narrator's discretion.

In a pinch, characters can use this to critically succeed when the odds are against them.

[khyron1144]

This is an interesting discussion.

Planet tries to do fun things with terminology.  For example, learned skills like using a particular class of weapon well, luck-based things that either happen or don't like a Bar Sark's ability to resist death, and racial powers like a cat's good night vision are combined under the umbrella term of Nifties.  I used the term Nifty because having one is a beneficial thing that might make someone say:  "Well that's nifty!'

Planet is itself one example.  I was thinking of setting and mechanics at nearly the same time, and I had a thought about how unimaginitive humans can be when naming important things.  For example The Earth and The Moon are the most boring names in the solar system.  Everything else is named for a God that has some trait similar to the planet.  So it made sense to me that an artificial planet might simply be called Planet by its inhabitants.  So the game I am creating to describe adventures on Planet is named Planet.

Both the modern sapiens sapiens and the extinct sapiens neandertalis subspecies of Homo sapiens are playable races in Planet, so they are referred to as such on the main list of playable races.

Then there's the IntAmHuP, another playable race.  Intelligent Ambulatory Humanoid Plants sounded like a more accurate description for a sentient flora PC race than plant men or treefolk or any of the usual suspects from fantasy, SF, and RPG history.

[Morgan Coldsoul]

That's an interesting take on the idea: Use people's tendency to take language for granted to provoke a reaction. By calling the world "Planet," you create layers of different meanings for different players, but you also draw attention to the fact that it's the concept that's important, not so much the name. The name evokes a response about the concept. That's a slightly different branch on the tree of what I meant, but I like it.

I've used a bit of the same technique; when it came time to name cities and countries and rivers and things, the cartography slowed to a crawl because we started running out of creative names. "Pellucidan Prison," "Emeraldale," and "Shiva's Breath" devolved into "that big long river, you know, the one that goes all loopy just here." I decided to start coming up with simpler names based on the location of the site, and before long, I found I was actually getting some good names again. Not every name or term has to be "special" to evoke a response; now, looking at our maps, I find that "Snowmount," "Hagmarsh," and "Starfall" conjure images just as powerful as "Cathedral Canaliculus" and "Sarkûn." It's a bit of a relief, actually--to us, the developers, because we can think up names more easily, and to the players, because their tongues can take a break from horrible dwarvish and draconic place names.