Persona system

[Bankuei]

  This system has been floating in my head for a couple of months, so let me know what you think of it.  The goal is a system that encourages plot twists and dramatic roleplaying on the part of the players.

 Character creation starts with the Hero Wars'  style 100 word paragraph.  It actually doesn't matter how many words you get to use as long as you get a solid character concept down of who your character is and what you are good or bad at.  

 Then you create a Goal, a Need, and 3 Values for your character.  

A Goal is an ideal, usually one word, although you can use a description to flesh it out, such as: Perfection-  acheiving the best one can in a lifetime.  The Goals are always abstracts, something you can strive for but never acheive.  

A Need is likewise an emotional/mental issue the character needs to overcome or face, such as: Opening Up- he needs to let go of his fear of people and let them into his life...

The Values are three statements which your character believes strongly.  Examples could be:  Eye for an eye, You have to look out for yourself, and Only the strong survive.  Think carefully, the campaign will revolve around these values for your character.

 The base mechanic revolves around 2 dice of the same type(I like D6's, but, whatever).   One die is the Hero die, the other the Challenge die(usually controlled by the GM, but it doesn't matter who rolls).   If all things are even, roll both, highest wins, ties are ties. If the Hero die is higher, the character succeeds, if it is lower, the character fails.

 Of course, rarely are things even.  If things lie in the character's favor, then the Hero die gets one or more rerolls, and if its against the character, the Challenge die gets one or more rerolls.  From now on, rerolls will be indicated as +(Hero), or -(Challenge), so +2 means the Hero die gets two rerolls.

There are two types of resolution: Quick and Extended.  In the Quick resolution, only one die can have rerolls if there is any.  So each +1 and -1 cancel each other out.  For extended resolution, both dice get all of their rerolls, leading to ties more often.  The lower the die type(D6, D4), the more often you will tie.

So which die gets  what rerolls?  Its based on 3 factors:  Concept, Situation, and Motivation.  

Concept says if the odds were equal, would this character succeed?(Master  vs. Novice)
If its in the character's favor, then its a +1, if its against, -1, and if its neutral, or the character is just equal to the task, no extra rerolls.  How do you know how good a character is?  Look at the Concept Paragraph...This requires cooperation between the GM and the player, but I don't think its too hard to work out.

Situation takes into account other factors, such as better tools, tactics, other environmental factors, etc.  If the character is aided by such, then they get +1, hindered, -1, or otherwise no modifier.

Finally motivation-If any of your values are at stake or involved, then you get a +1.  If you are actively working against one of your values, then you are at -1.  Otherwise no modifier.  In the case above, perhaps the character can ignor pain, because he is afraid of looking weak in front of the others("Only the strong survive"), or perhaps ignor the suffering in others.

What's happening with all these rerolls?  This is where the action kicks in. Only the last roll determines outcome.  All the rolls before that result in Advancements or Setbacks.

Advancements occur anytime the Hero die is higher, and Setbacks anytime the Challenge die is higher.  The player can describe Advancements which may not win the conflict, but may help later(disarm, discover a secret, etc), and likewise Setbacks(oops, stumbled into that one...)

For example, if two characters are in combat, and the player rolls H3, C2, then perhaps he drives back the enemy to the wall...reroll C4, now the foe has turned the tables and swept the hero off his feet...reroll H6, the hero uses his father's Rising Phoenix Fist....reroll C6...only to have it countered by the one technique only his father knew... etc.etc.

Obviously you can reroll and end up lower than where you started, just showing another setback. And you can always choose to leave a tie where it is if you want to play it safe.  The contest roll is over when neither side can, or chooses to use rerolls.

Most importantly, is the reward system.  First, you only get 1 Story point if you took a step towards your Goal, one for a step towards fufilling your need, and one for each value you reaffirmed or challenged.  

For example, you could have a situation where you are betrayed, but covered your rear("Look out for yourself"), or instead, where you are taken care of by someone else and have to learn to trust, in which case you can change your value("Look out for those around you").  Either one would get you a Story point.

Your story points can only be used to add an element to the story(character, item, location, etc), remove an element to the story, or change(not improve), your character.  Each point will let you alter one of your Values.  You could also use a point to add a sentence to your concept.  The GM determines when and if you actually improve at anything.  The only incentive to change the character is because you want to.

Story points also follow the Player, even if you change characters.  This way, you don't lose anything if your character dies, goes insane, enlightens, etc.  Do whatever fits the story, you lose nothing by losing a character.

Hopefully this long post hasn't reverted your body and brain back to that of the invertebrae kingdom... :razz:  Let me know what you think.

Bankuei

[Julian Kelsey]

In short I like it. It overlaps a lot with things that I'm trying to do so I'll discuss in terms of what I hope for. But I think there's good stuff in here just as it is, a sort of streamlined Hero Wars character descrioption and extended resolution system.

What types of scenes do you most imagine it to be used to support and resolve? Do you have a particular setting which is informing or driving this systems development?

The goal is a system that encourages plot twists and dramatic roleplaying on the part of the players.

I've found it useful to read books on story and script writing to get a language for describing dramatic movement in stories. Look at Vogler's "The Heroes Journey" and McKee's "Story".

I ask myself would the system in it's normal play lead to the patterns of tension and resolution that occur in the movies I like. Two main things I'm looking for in a system at the moment.

First, which is here in this game through rerolls, very neat, a process of vying for advantage with success hinging on some final critical moment. This builds outer tension. Your stated goal is for the system to be linked to drama in situations so I think you're absolutely right to feature character values and goals so strongly.

Second is transformation of the characters. As you'll see below I'm interested in structuring Values more highly than your system and emphasising this point more strongly.

Character creation starts with the Hero Wars'  style 100 word paragraph. (...) Then you create a Goal, a Need, and 3 Values for your character. (...)

I did a double take when I saw this, very like what I've been thinking, right down to 3 values (I call them motivations).

The Values are three statements which your character believes strongly.  

I think making Values a structure in the system and the driving force in a character is good. My housemate isn't convinced, these are things he wants to control and have manifest in his role playing rather than be proscribed by a system.

I've been working on them as something like the scales in Wuthering Heights. Except the players pick three scales which represent three significant motivations or sources of driving energy or even preferences in circumstances and method best suited to their character.

Example from Wuthering Heights: Dispair to Hope or Rage to Calm. I also think things like: Honourable to Dishonourable would work. But also like Favours-Chaos to Favours-Order. A theasaurus helps a lot.

The idea is that both ends of the scales can fuel an action, and that the end of a scale that is strong for a character may actually be working against a characters goal.

Think of the gunman who is no longer able to summon up the will to pull the trigger. Or the other gunman who wants to be a farmer but can't escape the forces in his character that drive him to wildness. (Name those movies.)

I'd have these scales shift during play, so that if the exercising of a Value relates to the characters Goals then it may be reinforced or dimished.

 The base mechanic revolves around 2 dice of the same type(I like D6's, but, whatever).  

My only reservation is the tendancy in the system as written to have just a couple of rerolls seems a little course grained, I think I'd like more options here. Also I think I'd be going with a D10's or D12's. (I'm going to try a few scenes at this on the weekend, I'll get back to you).

For example, if two characters are in combat, (...)

My current favourite conflicts to consider as examples at the moment are sniper scenes, arguements at a party, and back ally gun fights.

I watched Replacement Killers last night, and I suspect that what you've got going here could well capture the struggle of John Lee (Chow Yun Fats character) as he's taking aim for an assination early in the movie.

Enemy At The Gates is the big sniper movie of recent times and to have a system that could underpin and structure that type of tension would be real coup, I'll let you know how it works for me.

Most importantly, is the reward system.  (...)

I'm keen to see the consequences of using a Value to reinforce an action feed back into the Value itself, that's part of my interested in Values with scales.

By having Values scaleless and using story points you allow players to do this indirectly, they can modify they character description, I'd like to see it more tightly coupled. But then there is room for two more systems in the world.

Story points also follow the Player, even if you change characters.  (...)

I really like that sense that story points for players rewards and encourages a player in the context of the whole story rather than just in the context of one character; the player has encouragement to allow dramatic change even on the scale of characters dying.


Cheers, Julian.

[Julian Kelsey]

I've found it useful to read books on story and script writing to get a language for describing dramatic movement in stories. Look at Vogler's "The Heroes Journey" and McKee's "Story".

That should be Vogler's "The Writers Journey", it's a very level headed presentation of ideas akin to Joseph Campbells but strictly in the context of movies. His basic argument is that while it's hard sometimes tell why a movie is good, it's easy to recognise why it's bad and gives a language for describing what might go wrong, in terms of the purpose of scenes and characters and the notion of a story archetype. I think it's a good tool for judging the mix of scenes and events and NPC in games.

Cheers, Julian

[Bankuei]

  Thanks Julian for being one of the few to dig through my badly described idea :razz:

I was really impressed with the conflict resolution behind Hero Wars and Story Engine, in that the exact same system worked for any conflict, be it physical, mental, social, on a personal scale, or that of nations at war.  I wanted to be able to capture that with this resolution system.

 The idea of rerolls is that each time you reroll, it's that point of tension in the action where you can get a sudden shift of power.  I also make it a point that you need to narrate each reroll, so its more than rolling dice.  

Also, even if the odds turn against you, they can be narrated in such a way to make things better for you in the future("My blaster's overloading!"..."Eat plasma--Kaboom!").  

The Value system isn't designed to be static, instead, your character's changes are focused around the values.  You only receive points based around the values, so it's in your best interest to spend a point here or there to change the values of your character to what you want to play.  In drama, most of the character development centers around affirming a character's values or changing them.  

Example of affirmation:  The classic competitive sports movie filled with a team of rag-tag kids who make it to the championship, and then forfeit, having decided that who they were becoming, or their values that they were sacrificing weren't worth the victory.("Friends are more important than winning", "I was right all along, how could I have doubted myself?")

Example of change: Unforgiven..."I'm not that [violent] person anymore"...which was a certainly true statement until the end of the movie...

Change or affirmation can either represent growth or a descension/corruption(Ninth Gate)...Either way the point is the expression of the character.

I agree that D6 is a low die, likely to end up in a tie, but remember that most conflicts will use the quick resolution, with only 1 side getting any rerolls at all.

Let me know how your test works out.

Bankuei

[Bankuei]

  Thanks Julian for being one of the few to dig through my badly described idea :razz:

I was really impressed with the conflict resolution behind Hero Wars and Story Engine, in that the exact same system worked for any conflict, be it physical, mental, social, on a personal scale, or that of nations at war.  I wanted to be able to capture that with this resolution system.

 The idea of rerolls is that each time you reroll, it's that point of tension in the action where you can get a sudden shift of power.  I also make it a point that you need to narrate each reroll, so its more than rolling dice.  

Also, even if the odds turn against you, they can be narrated in such a way to make things better for you in the future("My blaster's overloading!"..."Eat plasma--Kaboom!").  

The Value system isn't designed to be static, instead, your character's changes are focused around the values.  You only receive points based around the values, so it's in your best interest to spend a point here or there to change the values of your character to what you want to play.  In drama, most of the character development centers around affirming a character's values or changing them.  

Example of affirmation:  The classic competitive sports movie filled with a team of rag-tag kids who make it to the championship, and then forfeit, having decided that who they were becoming, or their values that they were sacrificing weren't worth the victory.("Friends are more important than winning", "I was right all along, how could I have doubted myself?")

Example of change: Unforgiven..."I'm not that [violent] person anymore"...which was a certainly true statement until the end of the movie...

Change or affirmation can either represent growth or a descension/corruption(Ninth Gate)...Either way the point is the expression of the character.

I agree that D6 is a low die, likely to end up in a tie, but remember that most conflicts will use the quick resolution, with only 1 side getting any rerolls at all.

Let me know how your test works out.

Bankuei

[Julian Kelsey]

Thanks Julian for being one of the few to dig through my badly described idea :razz:

I'm interested in seeing a streamlined mechanic that is a simulation of dramatic movement and character transformation as found in stories. That makes it easy for me to give time to.

The idea of rerolls is that each time you reroll, it's that point of tension in the action where you can get a sudden shift of power.

At first I'd been thinking of each roll as a shift in the relative advantage that one protagonist has over another (perhaps what you mean by shift of power). A simulation of something measurable, but perhaps it could be more abstract.

Does it matters if the numbers on the dice are given concrete meanings? Should it be something mappable to story concepts such as dramatic points of tension? Or should it be described as more simulation of relative advantage or balance of power?

Expressed as shifts in dramatic tension it becomes more clear that these moments are intended to flexible for narrative invention.

The handling time on your dice system is really nice, very short, which is a bonus. The value on the die just rolled as it sits on the table is what matters so there's no need to track shifts with tallys or numbers or counters or another die.

I also make it a point that you need to narrate each reroll, so its more than rolling dice.  

So the dice rolls are mapped to story events in the order that events occur and narration is conducted at each step. Perhaps it needs clauses like the ones in SOAP explaining that even if the character looks like they died they didn't really. No matter how dire it looked you made it out alive in the end.

I've not played Hero Wars but I've been reading a lot about it and talking to players and the feeling I get is that it emphasises a retrospective reinterpretation of rolls.

I've begun to wonder about the possibility of dice rolls being out of temporal order, instead working backwards or in any order, perhaps start with the conclusion and figure out how you got there. Difficult because we tend to recall and tell stories in temporal order and this might make it hard to feel involved with the action. More on this another day.

The Value system isn't designed to be static, instead, your character's changes are focused around the values.

By the time I got to the end I'd started seeing this, exercised through the story points system, but hinging on a players decision to do it.

In my opinion this is almost the most significant difference between the game you've presented and most others: The character of the character matters and is subject to change. This inner journey is so important in stories but is often one of the most inflexible parts of a character description in games.

Maybe it could be made more clear, perhaps even constrained, by the linking of values to goals or needs demanding certain uses of story points.

You only receive points based around the values, so it's in your best interest to spend a point here or there to change the values of your character to what you want to play.

Which then becomes the game, that shifting of values based on experience and present circumstance in order to work towards the goals or fulfil needs.

In drama, most of the character development centers around affirming a character's values or changing them.  

McKees book "Story" suggests that any scene which doesn't do this should be cut, any exposition it contained should be folded into scenes where values are at stake.

The movement you suggest is that the scenes are a fixed part of the game and the character is having values shifted to enable the pursuit of it's goals in these types of scenes.

I agree that D6 is a low die, likely to end up in a tie, but remember that most conflicts will use the quick resolution, with only 1 side getting any rerolls at all.

You've left this as a flexible option, I may well do up some charts of probabilities of outcomes. I'm also thinking that degree of difference in the final roll giving a degree of outcome might be feasible.

Perhaps the size of the dice could be linked to the likely number of rerolls to get a dice independant balance?

Does it need to be emphasised that narrative power enables strong simulation and even game winning outcomes if that's what they need? I have trouble getting the people I play with to see the point, so I'm looking for scenarios that are best played with narrative focused systems. Would it help to have a setting? Just to focus people on the idea that is for a motive rich and transformation focused type of play, to explain why the rules are what they are.

(Sorry if I sound like I'm railroading your game, what I'm hoping is that you'll solidify your explainations, expositions, and intentions in light of these ideas even if the position you come to involves strong arguements against my present waffles).

Let me know how your test works out.

I certainly will. The plan is to try a few scenes with a couple of different systems, a sort of compare and contrast thing, we'll see what happens.

Cheers, Julian.

[contracycle]

I fear this really needs to be discussed in the light of Premise and Protagonism.

[Bankuei]

  I'll address the general reasoning behind the rules first, and get to your specific questions later when I get more time tonight.

I've been thinking a long time about a system that incorporates the dramatic tension, the constant plot twists that you see in movies, books, and other stories.  I wanted to keep the excitement of constant turnover in terms of who is in power or at advantage.  That was the reasoning behind the base mechanic.  I wanted it to work on all levels, from gritty realism to superpowered, but I didn't want to work up a giant point scale or any of that.

As far as the the character system, I wanted something to simulate the internal struggle altering the external struggle, or the moment of revelation, redemption, or what have you in a story that changes the outcome.  The point where the hero's realizations shift the odds in their favor.  

I looked at what was "good roleplaying" since almost all games give a reward for it without defining what it is.  I started with the premise that good roleplaying is the expression of the character, and the character's growth as a character, not their growth in power.  I wanted to let the players choose what that growth meant, and what it represented, since growth for a hero in the classic sense meant overcoming flaws, while for a tragic hero would be descending deeper into their flaws.

I felt that the point of character power was the basic way players were allowed to influence story, so the true point was the authorship, not the power levels of the character, hence story points.  This doesn't mean that characters don't get more powerful, but they do based on what the point of the story is.  You could play Dragonball Z with this system, and it would perfectly recreate the infinite power escalation, plus the protagonist comeback with the desire to protect loved ones.

I'll probably get a chance to write up a more clarified rules set this week, but I was talking to some folks, and they got excited about it, and I felt it was good to get the basic idea up before someone beat me to it :smile:

Bankuei

[Bankuei]

>Does it matters if the numbers on the dice are given concrete meanings? Should it be something mappable to story concepts such as dramatic points of tension? Or should it be described as more simulation of relative advantage or balance of power?


The individual rerolls need not apply to specific actions.  Just as in Hero Wars a dice contest could represent a trend(Acculturation, Ideological movements popularity, the success of a relationship, etc.), you can do the same here.  You could identify two different movements, say pop music and alternative, give them values-mainstream, all ages, radio friendly, vs. edgier, cynical, counterculture and play out the trend battles over time.  Now I wouldn't necessarily do it for that example, but if you want to see what happens to a culture 30 years ahead of time(America vs. Native Indians).

On the question of "reverse-order" narration, I actually designed the system with the idea that you wouldn't have to do that, hence the rerolls, instead of roll everything, pick highest.  Because you don't know if your next roll is going to be higher or lower, its a gamble and a real life tension point every time.  I guess you could say the design philosophy was the journey is as important as the destination.  You could describe a situation where you are losing a contest(disarmed, knocked over the edge of a cliff, and then you get kicked off), that then lets something else come to advantage(someone else grabbed your weapon while the opponent was busy).

I'm not sure I'd want to make more than 3 rerolls for either side.  With 3 rerolls maximum per player, that makes for 6-15 rolls/scene...I'm not big on long resolution mechanics.  Also, rerolls again come to a very easy equation of Character, Situation, and Motivation.  Character is your concept, Situation is modifiers and choices made by the player, and Motivation is the Dramatic element.

Finally, as to any of the possible backgrounds for this system, you could take anything where motivation affects the story.  The Crow(feel my pain), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Matrix(There is no Spoon), etc.  In my mind, most of my games would probably be martial arts/superhero based, since I'm an action head.  This system is great for samurai duels where resolve and personality play as much a role as skill.  

My current working background is called Forgotten Fist, sort of a Kungfuthulu thing, ancient martial arts orders put in place to hold back That Which Must Not Be Named :smile:

Bankuei