Universalis Redux

[CPXB]

I played Universalis, again, last night with a slightly different group of people.  In particular, John Marron was absent and his replacement was not as good as John, shall we say, hehe.

While I emphasize how much I love this game, the different dynamic made for a vastly different feel.  In particular, the new player only involved himself in complications, and then committed resources enough to win (in really frivolous ways, I feel) and then reaped huge rewards.  But instead of using these huge rewards to enhance the narrative, he'd do this really bare-bones description of what happened -- seriously, last night he won a complication and got thirty coins and spent maybe six of them describing what happened -- and then that'd be that.

And the frivolity of the traits he'd put in!  He wanted to get into some action, so he introduced a character who had, well, a tank.  And one of the traits was "Accurate fire x 5."  Later on, during another fight, he revealed that the character he controlled had "Cybernetic combat enhancement x 10" -- or, well, he tried, but I challenged that and he backed down . . . only to spend those ten coins on buying dice!  (We could have a stop to that, too, by making him describe WHY he got ten dice.)  And then after winning the challenge he kept most of the wealth.

The character framed no scenes.  So he kept his wealth.  He made zero named character.  Keepin' his wealth.  Hoarding it for complications.

The good news is two-fold.  I managed to have fun around this, hehe, and this isn't a person with whom we often play and he's starting a game of his own so he won't be around when Universalis is run.  But, still, I had to get it off my chest that it is, apparently, possible to break Universalis if a player is suffiicently stingy and considers wealth to be hoarded instead of spent.

[Valamir]

Hey Chris,

Yup...that happens on occassion.  Any player dedicated to being a twink can derail most any game.

But sometimes its a honest holdover of more gamist tendencies that generally work themselves out.  Unlike say hording "Hero Points" or "Drama Dice" or the like which often then get converted into XPs, sitting on a big pile of Coins at the end gives you absolutely nothing, so eventually they often realize that hording is pretty pointless.

Sometimes the guy is just being a twink.

There are some anti twink tactics you can use when that behavior rears its head.

For instance you can Rules Gimmick in a rule that says 1/2, or 3/4, of Coins generated from a Complication must be spent on that complication.

A similiar option is a Gimmick that any Coins not spent by the player in the Complication can be spent by the other players in clockwise order.

I recommend heartily enforcing the "justify the Dice you buy" rule.  If they're going to buy 10 dice...at least force them to add stuff to the scene that's interesting.

Make frequent use of negotiation.  "Do you really want Accuracyx5?  Based on <blah blah> I think just plain Accuracy (or Accuracy x2 or whatever) is more appropriate".  If you get alot of nodding heads from other players at this point, often times they'll simply go along with it.

If you're getting alot of x4s and x5s and the like, describe how much more effective it is to by 4 or 5 related things at x1 apiece.  x5 Accuracy might provide 5 dice when a tank is trying to shoot something, but Accuracy, Long Range, Enhanced Visual Sensors, Computer AI Fire Control, and Sattelite Targeting System will also provide 5 dice is almost all of the same situations, as well as provide alot more flexibility to be used for other things.


Another good Tactic is to take Control of "his" creations and use the dice yourself.  Since there's no permanent ownership in the base rules there's no reason you couldn't take control of Accuracy x5 Tank and have it attack Cybernetic X10-boy and use the resultant Coins to kill them both (There's no rule that says the winner can't eliminate the winning character as part of his "victory" as long as it still could be described as a victory in at least the Pyrrhic sense).

Similarly you don't even need a complication.  If you have the Coins, simply pay to eliminate the character out right.

Or...even more sneaky...Take control of the Tank and add "The Tank is experiencing malfunctions that render it inoperable" 1 Coin, and "There are no suitable facilities in this city for repairing a tank of this type" 1 Coin.

Now the Tank is out of action.  All's the other player has to do is pay 1 Coin to buy off the malfunction Trait...except...if his justification for doing that includes repairing the tank (most likely) you can challenge that on the grounds of the second Fact...and have your Coins for Challenge purposes doubled in the process.  Now he'd have to narrate how he took the Tank somewhere else to get it repaired, etc., etc. which at the very least is getting him to narrate something


Ultimately the best solution with a real Twink is to not play Uni with them.  But sometimes, a little bit of fighting fire with fire to demonstrate not only the creative control, but also the power of consensus is enough to get the light bulb to go off and they start really playing.

[CPXB]

Hey, Ralph.  ;)

A lot of things you said we'd basically come up with on our own.  We ended play shortly after the x10 thing, but if the game was going to be an ongoing game we'd've made a rules gimmick limiting that sort of behavior as well as spending coins to get dice in complications.  We all very pleasantly noted that the game does become more of the game you need it to be over time, which is one of the reasons I'm strongly itching to play in a long-term Universalis game.  If we had played again, too, if he bought coins I would have enforced the need to narrate why his guy has ten dice.  I mean, did he grab a fuel hose, spray it towards the enemies and light it, turning it into a flamethrower?  THAT would have been cool.

With this particular player, yeah, he's pretty heavily gamist.  I sometimes don't even grasp why he's in role-playing as a hobby.  He seems to want to win so much that, well, wargames would seem to fit him better.  He isn't interested in dialogue, he never puts his characters into uncomfortable spots.  He is also bad at narration -- but he's also a longtime GM.  Since I don't actually play with him, very much, outside of one-shot situations or situations where a third party was running the game, I hadn't really been able to see this.  He mostly wants to be able to roll the dice and win and in Universalis that sorta misses the point of the game.  I mean, sure, you get a ton of coins . . . but at the end of the night you put 'em back in the bowl, hehe.  And no-one regards having a lot of coins at the end a sign of victory, anyway.

Maybe he would have gotten out of hoarding coins if we had continued to play.  However, I don't think he was as enamored of the system as I am -- or at all, because a person could still really like the game and not be as enamored of it as I am, hehe -- and he's gonna be running a BESM game (with me and Adrienne; like I said, we don't much game together) so the odds are I'll never see if he warms to it.

[hix]

My last Uni group had a player that exhibited the 'coin-hoarding' and the 'bulk-buying of dice in a complication' behaviours.  In fact, the lowest point of the game came when he bought 20 dice in a complication without justifying / narrating each one.

However, his behaviour had a very clear cause. He had created a character, added lots of traits to it and considered it his. He would take control of it at every opportunity and reaped massive coins from it. Before we understood the implications of the Covering Your Bases thread, he had about five times as many coins as any other player and seemed to use them mostly to seize control of 'his' character and fight off any attempts from other people to play the character in the scene.

(This led to one 'hilarious' exchange where I called his bluff and spent all my coins to try and buy the character, reducing him down to 20 or so - about equivalent with the rest of the players. Not a moment high in maturiosity for me.)

Anyway, it's another potential motivation for this type of behaviour: possessiveness.

[Christopher Weeks]

I'm not actually convinced that this twinkiness does break Universalis.  What if you ignore it?  Let everyone else in the game continue to play "right" and let him do his little hoard thing.  Is the game/narrative harmed?  If you can get your own psychology over the fact that he's missing the point, you can still just have fun.  If he enjoys dying with the most toys, let him.

Also, I'm surprised that Ralph didn't mention laying down a fine.  If you really don't like a player's continued behavior, fine him.

And finally, I'll note that there have been complications where I wanted to win, generated a dice-pool that would, and ended up with way, way more Coins than I needed to enforce my vision.  So what do you do if you won 28 Coins and only needed six?  You can bank the 22 for later investment or you can just add details that you don't care about.  Either solution is a bit awkward.  I know this isn't the situation described above, but I thought it was worth noting that it can happen even with players doing the right thing.

Chris

[Valamir]

Quite right Chris.

I actually forgot Fines completely.  I've never once had to use them in an actual game (except a couple times where it was just funny to fine someone for a Monty Python joke or a bad pun)...but never as an actual penalty.

[CPXB]

I'm not actually convinced that this twinkiness does break Universalis.  What if you ignore it?  Let everyone else in the game continue to play "right" and let him do his little hoard thing.  Is the game/narrative harmed?  If you can get your own psychology over the fact that he's missing the point, you can still just have fun.  If he enjoys dying with the most toys, let him.

Also, I'm surprised that Ralph didn't mention laying down a fine.  If you really don't like a player's continued behavior, fine him.

And finally, I'll note that there have been complications where I wanted to win, generated a dice-pool that would, and ended up with way, way more Coins than I needed to enforce my vision.  So what do you do if you won 28 Coins and only needed six?  You can bank the 22 for later investment or you can just add details that you don't care about.  Either solution is a bit awkward.  I know this isn't the situation described above, but I thought it was worth noting that it can happen even with players doing the right thing.

Chris

LOL.  I actually said that it was irrelevant that he hoarded coins to my fiancee.  In Universalis, coins have value only if spent, after all.

But I think the problem is how he choose to participate in complications.  Sure, I dig that often there are complications a person wants to be sure to win and they spend accordingly.  However, this player wanted to win all complications.  So when he was on the antagonist's side he'd pour resources into that; when he was on the protagonist's side he'd pour resources into that.  I wasn't getting any sense of narration; just a desire to win whatever complication he happened to be in at the moment.  I think this was reinforced by his extremely sparse narratives through the complications.  He wasn't giving his tank "accurate fire x 5" because he thought the tank had the best fire control systems in the universe but because he wanted to win the complication easily.  Then, afterwards, we had to live with the fact there was this super-tank in the game.  Which is actually why I challenged him about the "cybernetic combat systems x 10" -- that was something we'd have to live with, either having to spend down the trait or not and having this guy going around stomping everything in sight (which wouldn't have bothered me, really).  The player seemed to have no interest in the actual narrative; he just wanted to win.  So I think that was the problem, not that he wanted to win any particular complication to match his view of what the story ought to be.  He had no such vision.  He was making it impossible for us to enact a vision because, I feel, he was sorta stomping around in complications.

If the player was in the game long-time, that would be something I'd think about doing, yeah.  Given this player, though, I think he'd HATE being fined and might leave a game that did it to him before too long.  I think it would have been wiser to merely limit how many coins could be spent on a complication -- or at least enforce the narration on getting those coins, which we didn't do, unfortunately; I think that would have solved the problem because he would have froze, heh -- and certainly on multiple traits to avoid the x10 sort of stuff.  I certainly think that Universalis presented enough ways to handle problems without resorting to fines -- which is one of the reasons I love the system.

[Christopher Weeks]

If the player was in the game long-time, [fines] would be something I'd think about doing, yeah.  Given this player, though, I think he'd HATE being fined and might leave a game that did it to him before too long.

There you go!  Proof that the game isn't broken by twinkiness, the problem solves itself.  :-)

Chris