Ygg descriptor formalism

[Christoffer Lernö]

I'm thinking of a scheme for Ygg descriptors here.

First off Powers, skills, spells all have a corresponding level of Otherworldiness. For illustrative purposes, let's use descriptions of the levels rather than numbers. From big to small, it'd look something like this:

* Legendary
* Mythic
* Magical
* Enchanted
* Weird
* Ordinary

This is the extent of how magical this ability is. A normal skill like "Cooking" would usually be "Ordinary". Anything above ordinary means that there is something unusual to it. Having an "Weird" cooking skill might mean that no matter what the food it always tastes slightly of almonds, or on the negative side it might always turn out bitter.
An enchanted skill might be used to make a feast out of anything. The cook might take a shoe and boil it in water and make a delicious spicy soup out of it.

Secondly the ability/spell/power/skill/whatever also has something called it's Mythpower (or simply Power). This determines the extent of its effects. From big to small, something like this:

* Earth-sundering
* Enormous (might affect a whole region)
* Great (might affect a city)
* Huge (might affect a huge area)
* Large
* Medium
* Small
* Minor
* Minute

(these lists could use some tweaking)

You can basically cross-index these to get the maximum effect. Power x Extent Of Magic tells you how much change this power creates as a rule of thumb.

Obviously a very minute power aren't gonna toast the world at first attempt no matter how legendary. Also, the Earth-sundering powers of an "weird" ability is very limited in the amount of change it actually makes.

An example of an Earth-Sundering class spell with only a "Weird" otherworldiness would be a spell that causes autumn to come early, or a rain sweep over the continent.

Anyway, the product might be a suitable "cost calculation" for any possible magic or mundane power.

Just an idea for a framework. Any thoughts?

[Andrew Martin]

Perhaps get rid of "Earth-Sundering" ? It seems to imply something that you're emphatically denying. I'd suggest something like "country", "land", "realm", "nation" or similar.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Yeah, maybe an ill-chosen word, but ignoring that (which isn't supposed to be anywhere near "final" choices anyway), what's your impressions of it Andrew?

[Peregrine]

To get away with a system like this you need to make sure that the order of descriptive words is reasonably intuitive. Basically you should be able to jumble to list up, give it to someone else, and ask them to reassmble it into worst-to-best, then get back a list resonably similar to your orignal.

Fudge does this very well. The list of skill and attribute tags are nicely intuitive. Your lists, however, don't strike me as very intuitive. Basically if I jumple up the first one...

* Legendary
* Enchanted
* Ordinary
* Magical
* Weird
* Mythic

It becomes hard to reassemble it in your original order. Is enchanted better than magical? Is magical better than weird? Surely Mythic should be more important than Legendary (as myths involve gods, but legends only involve god-like men.)

Anyway, you might want to have a look at Fudge to see how its word-descriptives are laid out.

Chris

[Christoffer Lernö]

Chris, with all due respect I think you missed something I wrote: "For illustrative purposes, let's use descriptions of the levels rather than numbers."

Because it makes more immediate sense what I'm talking about than if I'd have given you arbitrary numbers.

"The otherworldliness of this Item is 5" wouldn't have said so much.

Actually I'm a little disappointed ;) I was expecting an in-depth reply from you drawing on your experience creating Wayfarer's Song.

[ADGBoss]

Looks interesting, I am using similar ideas for Seraphim with Skill descriptors and Atrribute descriptors.

Now my questions are:

Are the Descriptors ranged? i.e. Legendary 1, Legendary 2 etc... or are they static. Ordinary 1, Weird 2, Heroic 3 etc...

The dynamic of Power vs Extent seems very much a Degree x Volume, how much change in how much space.  An Ordinary Cook can change 1 item about her soup, a Legendary one maybe can 7... an Ordinary Cook with Earth Sundering Extent can possibly chnage 1 thing about a million bowls of soup...

Now I realise Ygg has very large power proportions or seems to, considering Mythic and Legendary are associated with it alot.  My only worry is how much of this is open to the players and at what power level? I get images of Nordic youths having an Akira like free for all outside of the Clan House.  Now this is not good or bad, I was just curious as to the power level.

Obviously its still early on but you might want to consider jettising different descriptors once you do get the numbers in place. You can use Ordinary for Degree AND for Volume etc...

Just a few thoughts

SMH
ADGBoss

[Mike Holmes]

How much damage does a Small Magical Spell of Wanton Evisceration do? How many targets can it affect?

Mike

[Christoffer Lernö]

Mike: Maybe you can kill insects or small animals with it by pointing at it and snapping your fingers. The "magic" part lets you say how otherworldy their method of expiring is. At the lowest levels they'd look like they died of old age or something, some natural cause of death. That's how magical it can look. Maybe a curse which indirectly causes the method of death? That's also possible. If you want them to explode into a mess of blood you better crank up the otherworldliness dial.

In a sense you have 3 parameters here: How magical the effect can look, the extent of its influence (it's power) and the product of these two which is the impact this spell or ability is allowed to have on reality. Obviously not well defined yet. But this was something I wanted to worry about later.

Sean: Don't get worried about the levels. Envision them running from levels 0 to 10 if the descriptors bother you. There's quite a difference between one level and the other though. For a destructive spell, maybe one can detonate a city and the next level can do the same to a whole country.

As for the power levels, this was supposed to cover all powers in the whole game ranging from the mundane to the power of gods. So don't worry if the high-end seems pretty high.
It might be a good idea for me to use a logarithmic type of scale to get things right.

Some things though: An ordinary skill is ordinary. If the extent was earth-shattering, then it would be like the ordinary skill that lets you be good at everything you ever could do or something. :)

To all: This might not be a good idea but I felt that if I didn't write it down I'd never see it's weakness and possible strength clearly.

[Mike Holmes]

Mike: Maybe you can kill insects or small animals with it by pointing at it and snapping your fingers. The "magic" part lets you say how otherworldy their method of expiring is. At the lowest levels they'd look like they died of old age or something, some natural cause of death. That's how magical it can look. Maybe a curse which indirectly causes the method of death? That's also possible. If you want them to explode into a mess of blood you better crank up the otherworldliness dial.

Hmmm. First, by "Magical" in the title, I was trying to indicate the third highest level of "Otherworldliness". My thought was that the "Otherworldliness" of an attack spell would have something to do with how much damage it could inflict. That is, that by just giving someone a stomachache by snaping my fingers, that would be about "Weird" and it would get worse and worse Until I could actually do something as "otherworldly" as kill a person, at perhaps "Mythic" level. I figured that "Magical" might do something like put them in a coma and dying. That would seem pretty otherworldly to me.

Also, by "small" I figured that this would mean an area of effect. As in a Small fireball bursts over a ten foot radius. But given what you've now clarified as Small, I see that a man must be...Medium?

Hmmm. Lesse. If the effect of the spell is described as "eviscerating a being such that it coughs up some blood and dies." and then I use your metrics as I see them now clarified, the Medium Magical Spell of Horrible Evisceration will automatically kill a man. That being the effect of the spell.

Starting to see the problem?

What if I want a Miniscule Weird spell of Diamond creation. Well, The miniscule is probably enough, but we'll bump it to monor or Small if that's neccessary. The effec is described as the caster closes his hand, and when he opens it a diamond appears. Weird, but not all that Otherworldly, Right? But now with a very small spell, I can create diamonds til I'm the richest guy in the land. You can say that creating a diamond is because of it's value, more otherworldly, but then isn't doing more damage more otherworldly?

See what I'm getting at? Even if you nail down what these levels are with examples, players are still going to need one of these metrics to reign in their actual in-game effect. Otherwise players will not know what par o the effects are considered limited by the "otherworldliness" part, and what is not. If dmage isn limited, and one of these metrics does not cover it (as you imply), then players are going to try to get away with Minute Ordinary spells of Creating Tiny Invisible Particles that can Destroy the Universe. OK, no, they won't do that, but they still won't know what they can do, effect-wise.

Just because it all seems intuitive to you, does not mean it is for anyone else. That's what mechanics are for, to garner a consensus of potential effect. If you don't have that, you're better off going freeform.

Mike

[Christoffer Lernö]

Mike,

It's good that I posted this thing, because it becomes increasingly obvious it wasn't a good solution. I hope you can forgive me for throwing out something half-baked like this, but I'm afraid it's the only way out of the dead end I think I'm painting for myself.

Something I feel that I should point out though:

"Miniscule Weird spell of Diamond creation" and descriptions like this are actually contradictory. What you have done is taking the "Diamond creation" and said "hey a 'miniscule weird' level spell can have this ability", something which is definately something that could be argued.

I know this is quite in line with what I posted but not with my intentions.

When I think of "Otherworldiness" and "Mythpower" (the former the miraculousness of it and the second its ability to create myth-like events)

It's not in the immediate point-based Champions sense.

For example, any diamond creation spell that would let you create how many diamonds you like would have a huge impact to say the least. It's rather miraculous, but not overly so, so I think weird, yes that could do it, but the Mythpower of this spell is great.

If you have the bug killnig spell, then the Mythpower doesn't need to be so great because BUGS DON'T MATTER so much. Unless you were trying to kill the Demon Locust Lord in form of a bug that is. In that case a spell working on normal bugs wouldn't help. Because you'd need something legendary in scope to defeat a demon lord.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Otherworldiness answers the question: How unreal does this ability seem, how fantastic is it?

Mythpower answers the question: What is the long standing effect on reality from this ability?

The descriptions can only work as a frame for the expression of the ability, it cannot impact on the above ratings.

So if I insist on coming up with a spell of "instantly killing every person on the earth except myself" and assign it as a minor weird spell. What the heck is the GM to do? I think the problem here is that the description of the spell tries to override the parameters it has assigned itself.

Either the GM simply can overrule the spell, or illusionist style alter the possible effects of it.

Another thing I toyed with would be to have the two levels as dice pools to roll for effects with. Trying to roll 2 dice or whatever to get enough of magic to achieve the effects needed to kill every single person on the earth would probably be pretty difficult to pull off.

Something like this: You try to use your "Minute Ordinary spells of Creating Tiny Invisible Particles that can Destroy the Universe"

To succeed to create something invicible you have have 1 success with your Otherworldiness dice. You roll the single die from having an "ordinary" spell. Ok, success.

Now these are supposed to destroy the universe. That's a pretty tall order. Let's say that's on the order of 20 successes against some equally tough target number.

You roll your single die you get from the "minute" keyword.  
- Oh, no success to destroy the world this time either!  Curses! My evil plot was foiled again! :)


(Ignore the dice rolling mechanics, it's just an example on how it could be done. The point is: you use the resources you get from the skill to try to perform the effect you have described through rolling somehow against the difficulty of it happening - which of course takes some of the complexity away from the ratings themselves and puts it into target numbers and such)

[Mike Holmes]

But that's what I've been saying all along!

Just rate the spells in terms of the damn dice that you're describing. Forget all the high-falutin' terminology, and leave the mystery of it all to the nifty description of the spell. But have hard mechanics backing it up. If you are worried that it'll be too much like skills, well, it won't; don't worry. If you have to insure that there are mechanics that go to scope, and such, then make size and "Otherworldliness" cost Success Margin. But interestingly, this should apply to skills as well. Oratory by it's very nature affects more people than Conversation. See Scattershot for a discussion of skills and scope.

And my suggestion is to have these mechanics differ from the "normal" mechanics not one whit if possible. Hence my suggestion to base them on ability ratings. Just like Hero Wars does.

Mike

[Andrew Martin]

...what's your impressions of it Andrew?

It's still only a one-truth world view that seems to fail to capture a magical feeling. One could equally as well replace the word scales with numerical or dice type scales, and loose nothing, as Mike points out.

What would be more magical would be to use the description of the spell itself as appropriate forces where necessary.

Let's take Mike's example spell (slightly reworded): "Spell of Wanton Evisceration". Seems reasonably magical to me; cast the spell on a person or animal, and they're in trouble with their guts now lying on the floor. If the target doesn't have guts, there's obviously no effect. Is there a need to use mechanics for this part? I don't think so. Maybe if the magician hasn't practiced much with this spell, or is being distracted, say by the target trying to hit him...

Of course the target may object with something like, the dragon's enchanted scales would surely protect against the effects of that spell! Then one would need to compare mage's spell power versus the enchanted dragon scales, to see which one beats the other.

So it seems like there's two parts to the magic, or two questions. Was the spell successfully cast by the mage? And, were the effects of the spell powerful enough to go through the target's defences?

[szilard]

"Miniscule Weird spell of Diamond creation" and descriptions like this are actually contradictory. What you have done is taking the "Diamond creation" and said "hey a 'miniscule weird' level spell can have this ability", something which is definately something that could be argued.

Hmmm... so, basically, if the goal is diamond creation, a "Miniscule Weird" effect might be limited to a minor spell of luck on a diamond miner or something?

I think the problem, as you seem to point out, lies in the "Diamond Creation" bit as opposed to the "Miniscule Weird" bit.

It appears you want to limit different sorts of effects to different Mythpower/Otherworldiness levels. For instance... unlikely but possible events (finding diamonds by digging in the dirt with a stick) can have a low Otherworldliness. Normally impossible events (such as the spontaneous creation of diamonds from nothing) cannot. Similarly, the outright creation of diamonds should require more Mythpower than simply moving them around.

One possibility would be to assign numbers to the different levels. Then list several types of effects as guidelines and require that they have a sum (of Otherworldiness+Mythpower) equal to a certain number. The exact level of each could be adjusted based on the desired method of acheiving the effect.

So... Diamond creation might be a middling number. You could conjure up some diamonds (magically stealing them from a Prince's hoard) - which would be relatively high in Otherworldiness but not huge in Mythpower (since the diamonds were simply moved) or you could plant some seeds that grew plants whose seed-pods contained diamonds, which might be a bit lower in Otherworldliness (though still pretty weird), but higher in Mythpower (creating the diamonds outright).

Or am I missing it?

~szilard

[Christoffer Lernö]

Hmm.. actually I see how this quickly becomes a question of very doubtful subjective judgements, so I'm throwing out the idea as far as absolute values are concerned. Deciding what is "medium" for example is not easy by any means. I'm looking into it right now.
As Mike is arguing, there is no reason these should be different from skills. I'm currently playing with a model where a skill or magic ability can be modified through two techniques: Retcon and Development.

Retcon implies that the ability was there all along and development implies it is aquired through for example training or improvisation. I was thinking of dividing whatever currency or rating that govern them so that they are kept independent of each other.

This might not be important from a narrative standpoint, but it's an important distinction in trying to uphold the illusion in sim mechanics.

For example let's say the magic spell of instant Bone Liquidification is supposed to be a formula handed over to humans by some demon. The mage is supposed to say the magic words and then it happens to whatever he points to. If this is the case it doesn't make much sense that the mage should be able to develop this spell to liquidify skin too.

However, if its the magic skill of bone liquidification it makes sense that the mage could learn to extend it to include flesh.

So again, two groups - Retcon and Development

Retcon is limited by the already established effects of the skill/ability, but can be pretty much anything that could have been previously unknown about the ability/item/skill that later is discovered.

Development is limited by how extendable the already established effects are.

Most skills/traits would start with a very high retcon potential which slowly goes down, while the possibility to develop it would increase with use.

[Bankuei]

Again, Chris, take the time to nail down the mechanics.  Hard mechanics creates hard(as in firm, not necessarily difficult) problems and hard solutions.  Right now we have a soft idea, some soft suggestions and no idea where it's going to go.  

While I understand the idea behind descriptive rankings, if they have a dice rating, people will need to see a chart to use them.  Plus I'm not exactly sure how this aids Ret Con.

Most skills/traits would start with a very high retcon potential which slowly goes down, while the possibility to develop it would increase with use.

Excuse me, huh?  Are you saying that basically anything could be anything, since you're just making it up on th fly?  Because that's what illusionism includes as a basic in its repretoire.  I'm not sure how this system helps that either.

What you're looking for is a means to run a successful illusionist game.  You've said before that you've never been satisfied with your game experiences.  How do you know what goes into a good illusionist game?  This isn't to push your buttons, but I'm not completely sure what goes into one either, nor how the mechanics you've mentioned up to this point aid that.

Chris