New game - Shadows in the Fog - help wanted

[Spooky Fanboy]

Hang on, I don't understand.  Do you mean that when you lay off cards for later improvement, that means you can't play cards to decrease concessions?  If so, I think I agree, but as you say, I need to see a playtest.

Yes, indeedy! It's got to be either "bank this for experience" or "let's breeze through this without making Concessions." Not both. You may need separate envelopes for cards if you do this, or just have the player write down what s/he banked and return the cards o the pile.

But I prefer the nastiness of "learning hard lessons" or "chalking it up to experience," as it were.

As do I. Just let the players know that, if they want to advance, they have to make certain Concessions. (And now it's my turn to get beaten up by the pun police!)

[Piers]

So, I know it's kind of impolite to just start re-writing things, but I couldn't get to sleep last night and I ended up fiddling with the task resolution system and experience and this came out.  Hopefully bits of it might be of some use.

Hand Sizes
The Gamemaster has a hand size of 6
Players have a base hand size of 5 and a maximum of 6.  At the start of each session, if their hand size is less than 5 it becomes five.  At the end of each session, players vote for the Best Character and Best Scene, and their creators receive an increase in hand size.  

Task Resolution
1.   Gamemaster sets Base Difficulty (0-3) for task.
2.   Gamemaster plays a card (from the deck or from his hand) into the difficulty pool.
3.   All Players, except the active player, may each add no more than one card to the difficulty pool.  No card added may increase the total in the difficulty pool to more than 15.  If a card would increase the difficulty to more than 15, it may not be played unless it is a trump.  If a trump is played, it trumps the difficulty, erasing previous cards and automatically increasing the difficulty pool to fifteen.  If multiple players wish to bid, bidding proceeds widdershins from the Gamemaster (or in 5, below, from the Active Player).  
4.   The active player  determines his Base Competence for the task according to his appropriate skill (Terrible ?1, Average 0, Good 1, Brilliant 2)
5.   The Active Player plays a card into his success pool.
6.   All other players, except the Gamemaster, may add cards to the success pool as 3 above.
7.   The Gamemaster and Active Player may now take turns adding cards to the Difficulty and Success Pools respectively until they both either cannot or do not want to play further cards.
8.   Base Difficulty + Difficulty Pool is compared to Base Success + Success Pool.  Concessions are made as follows: If Total Success is greater than Total Difficulty, the Player succeeds and the Gamemaster makes the difference in concessions to player.  If Total Success is less than Total Difficulty then the Player, the player succeeds but must make up the difference in concessions.  If the Total success is less than the difficulty minus three, the player fails, and must make concessions equal to the difference.
9.   All played cards are place in the appropriate player?s discard pile, except Trumps which are set aside.  A played Trump does not return to the deck until the next session.  
10.   Refresh all hands to their current size.

Character versus Character
Resolution as above, except both Characters use Success Pool plus Skill.  NPCs have a base pool according to their best skill (Terrible: None, Average: One, Good: Two, Brilliant: Three).

End of Scene
At the end of the scene, both the Players and the Gamemaster may if they wish:
1.   Play a Trump for Experience (see below).
2.   Discard as many cards from their hand as they wish.
3.   Shuffle their discard pile into their deck, if they desire.  Note that discarded Trumps may return to the deck, but played Trumps may not.
4.   Draw to refill their hand if they discarded.

Comments:
This keeps something of the feel of the original design while putting limits on both the bidding phase and the actual play of cards.  It gives both the Gamemaster and the Active Player a chance each to use their high cards before everyone throws in.  Then bidding allows everyone to throw a spanner in the works as before.  Finally, the last contest between Player and Gamemaster gives them a final chance to see how important the contest is.
The turnover of cards in this version is much faster than in the original, because hands continually refresh after each contest, but it has some in-built stops.  The erosion of Trumps poses a very important dilemma for the characters.  Because they are both very powerful in card play and the only way to use magic the players will tend to hoard them.  At the same time, the ability to continually play cards will tend to run through the deck, making Trumps accumulate in the hand.  If a player interferes too much in a given scene, pretty soon they should have nothing but Trumps to play.  Then they will have to use some of them and shuffle some of the others back into the deck.  At which point they will start to find it hard to locate trumps.  All sorts of weird interactions should go on based on the end of scene effects.  
Note, also, the odd effect of bidding in this version.  If either the Gamemaster or the Player are trying to play a combination of cards, the other Players can interfere by playing a mediumish card which may prevent the combination.  Or it might make it easier for them to get close to fifteen.

Playing Trumps for Experience
At the end of any scene, each player has the option of playing a Trump to ?mark? a particular aspect of that scene as important to his or her character.  This aspect is usually a character, place or series of events.  It does not necessarily have to appear in the scene, but it should be mentioned or alluded to in some way.  The player plays the Trump from their hand, and interprets it, suggesting how the card relates to the particular thing named, and how the character might be involved with it.  The Trump is then set aside, not merely removed from the player?s deck until the end of the session, but until the character in some way resolves his or her involvement with the marked thing.  Furthermore, the player?s Hand Size decreases by one.  

Resolution
Marking a place, character or other element of setting makes them central to the character?s interests and associations in the game.  It essentially indicates the Gamemaster and the other Players that this is soething they wish to pursue as part of their story.  Once that interaction is resolved in some way, or the relationship changes significantly, the player retrieves the Trump, returning it to his or her deck and receives a skill increase.  Note that often the player may then continue the association by playing a new Trump, and interacting with the thing in a new way.

Example
Albert St. Simeon is involved in a scene at the Seven Dials.  At the end of the scene, he decides that this mystical landmark will be important to his quest for magical knowledge, and he plays the Chariot?triumph, victory, the road to success.  In subsequent sessions, Albert becomes involved with a series of occult societies associated with this location, as he seeks knowledge and initiation.  Eventually, after aiding their members in resolving a murder, one of the Society of the Silver Twilight accepts Albert into its ranks.    Albert?s player returns the Chariot Trump to his deck, and Albert increases his Occult skill.  Albert?s player decides that the society will continue to be a central part of his interaction with the occult underworld of London, but decides that he will wait until and appropriate moment before playing a new Trump against them.

Limits
One a particular Trump has been played to in this way, no other player may play that Trump for experience except on the same thing.  In other words, there may only be one thing in the campaign primarily associated with that particular Trump.  Players may, however, play different Trumps on the same thing.  Indeed, this will often happen with central elements of a campaign?the main villain, a vital artefact, or something similar.  

Comments:
What I?m trying to do here is to allow characters to have an explicit method of stitching their interests into the campaign, and at the same time to tie the Trumps into that process.  The hand size rules interact with the experience rules in order to give a temporary penalty for setting up a Trump.  This is intended to prevent players making too many attachments too quickly?essentially, it?s to prevent the players spinning too many plots strands all at once.  Together with the role-playing awards, the limit to one trump per scene and the incentive to play the trump as late in the session as possible, these should act as a brake on the system getting out of control.  Finally, the removal of Trumps from the deck until their resolution acts as a tangible way of forcing the player to focus on a limited number of things, and also puts an interesting check on their magical powers?the card that is most useful for that particular predicament is not available for use in magic.  Hopefully, players will note this problem and only have a few Trumps out of use at once.

Thoughts?

[clehrich]

Piers,

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.  There are lots of interesting ideas here.  I don't love all of it, but let me walk through stepwise.

Task Resolution
1. The idea of setting an upper limit on difficulty, such that players can't keep throwing on more and more difficulties, seems not at all unreasonable, but I think one of the advantages of keeping cards intrinsically more valuable (i.e. not constantly refreshing hands) is that nobody's going to do this anyway, as it's pointless.  If you really want the difficulty to be very high anyway, you're going to have to explain why, since (following Spooky's suggestion) you now have to explain your bids.(1)  In this version, I think players are encouraged to bid on everything, which will slow down resolution greatly.

2. I don't like the fact that ultimately it boils down to Active Player vs. GM.  This strikes me as not only unnecessary, but also shifting the focus of bidding, which I think of as a way for non-Active players to influence what are traditionally GM-only decisions (difficulty, etc.).  Thus I see bidding as primarily a way for non-Acting players to "disagree" with the GM about the desirability of success at a given moment.

3. All my objections here really boil down to this: "If the Total success is less than the difficulty minus three, the player fails, and must make concessions equal to the difference."  For me, the whole point of the card resolution system is that you never, ever, really have to fail.  There's always a way out, by concessions, or playing high cards, or Trumping, or whatever.  It's just a question of balance: how much are you willing to pay for success on this?

4. In addition, "If a trump is played, it trumps the difficulty, erasing previous cards and automatically increasing the difficulty pool to fifteen," means that Trumps are not necessarily magical.  For me, that's exactly what they are: if you Trump, you shift the nature of the resolution, not just change the difficulty.

Marking Things With Trumps
This I like very much.  Most particularly, I like the idea that a given trump can only be marking one game-world thing at a time.  What happens here is that the player claims to impose a magical structure on some person or object, and indicates that she is wililing to devote considerable time to realizing the connection.  That special sort of task, when accomplished, generates skill increases.  I do think, however, that this does not cover all forms of skill increase equally, since some lend themselves to this sort of framework more than others, and so I can't see this as a replacement for any other skill system.  

I think it works best as a way for players to create subplots and give them an overarching Trump structure.  So if my character decides that he really, really wants to court some woman, and thinks that The Lovers is a good card for this, I play that card to mark the new subplot, and any and all actions happening in that subplot need to happen under the sign of The Lovers, as it were.

In essence, this is a long-term magical action system.  You can't fully control things through narration, and you don't know how long it will take, but your personal subplot now has a magical dimension, and when that plot is resolved you will be rewarded in some way (skill, etc.).

I think the rewards for resolution of such plots should be fairly open-ended, in the sense that there should be a number of suggestions for good types of rewards.  Then the group decides, by vote or whatever, which reward is appropriate, taking into account whatever the player said he wanted.

Removing Trumps
I personally would tend to avoid the removal of Trumps thing, but only in the sense that I would generally have as many decks shuffled together as there are players plus GM.  There are only 78 cards in a Tarot deck, and if you have 5 players plus GM, that's 31 cards immediately out in a hand.  This means that any card in your hand is also out of circulation, which allows a lot of card-counting stuff that I don't consider helpful.  As far as I'm concerned, you could have twenty decks shuffled together.  The point being that if you're doing something involving The Devil, I don't want the odds of The Devil showing up elsewhere (such as in someone else's hand) reducing too drastically, and certainly not to zero.


I'm going to have to sit down and think out some hands and some deals here, and I may well borrow more from your version than I've stated here.  At this stage, though, I think it puts too much emphasis on Action Resolution, which I'd prefer to be relatively unusual --- and quick! --- and encourages somewhat wild card play.

Notes
(1) The idea here is that if you want to bid as a non-Acting player, you should have a good reason for it.  This is usually a meta-reason, e.g. you think that this scene would make a great source of real conflict and drama if the Actor failed or nearly so.  Again, you might think that this Actor has a habit of trying to be good at everything, and needs a tough lesson.  This may also be a response to another bid, e.g. you think that the scene is likely simply to become dull and focused on a single character's failure (rather than involving larger themes or other people), so you want to bid back down that raised difficulty.  
'    This also functions as a group approval/disapproval structure, in that if one player bids the difficulty up or down for what the rest of the group considers a bad reason, especially if it's out of boredom, mean-spiritedness (I want him to lose because I like to watch people fail), or general-purpose power-gaming (I want him to succeed because success is success and lets us beat the GM), the rest of the group is likely to bid it back the other way.

(Next up: some remarks on session structure and the use of Trumps as plot/story elements.)