[YGAD] - finally, the 'finalized' core

[Tobias]

And I say that with some sarcasm - but at least, I now no longer have the feeling there's a gaping big hole in the system.

After the first testing, I've gotten rid of some of the elements I thought were slowing things down, and I've tied a bunch of concepts that were floating around and begging for their own stat or rules to things I thought were at the core of things. Plus I defined a World Web (a form of expansive Relationship Map, if you want a quick definition) as a mechanical way to measure character impact on their surroundings - since there is very little in the way of character growth by XP accumulation or growth in power.

What's left still needs testing, but is at least basically complete. Oh sure, I need to explain equipment again, work in something about healing (since there are wounds, and having nothing about healing may trip up people) and player aging and 'extra-special' stones - but all these are extras which are not needed right now.

The current rules should promote trying to make an impact, I hope, and be novel enough to explore. I finally have the base that will support setting, is my feeling.

I crammed everything together in core mechanics, which are posted as webpage here. For those who have been following - feel free to browse, and test on your own. In the meantime, I will be testing, and fleshing out setting and writing the damn bugger.

Thanks for your patience. Questions more than welcome - this is a bit of a "I'm tired and want to get the thing out there" post, since I have no clue how much time I'll have tomorrow and over the weekend.

[Tobias]

A little note, now that I've slept - the 'core' is not meant as a stand-alone text for distribution (although you are welcome to it). It's merely a scratching together and completion of all the mechanics, so that I can distribute to my players AND to interested folks at the Forge that have helped, so they can play with the mechanics as well, and see I'm still trying to go forward with this.

These mechanics need testing (and if you do, I will be thankful and pleasently surprised), so I will. Then will come a write-up of a complete 'book', which will be the first official rough draft of the thing. More testing, feedback, etc.

Thanks to everyone, again, for feedback, and patience. :)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tobias,

I am not bright. Can you post a link right here in this thread for download?

Best,
Ron

[Tobias]

I can, of course. :)

There was a link to a .html page in the previous post (the word 'here').

If you right-click that link, you will have the option to 'save target as file'- which will give you a .html somewhere on your drive, which you can then browse at your leisure.

If you prefer a .doc or a .pdf, let me know.

The full url:

http://www11.brinkster.com/tobiasopdenbrou/YGADPC12.htm

You'll probably get one picture failing to load, but please ignore that, it's not vital.

Any more questions, let me know.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

I'm curious, before I delve too much further: why is the bag necessary?

Isn't:

roll a d20:
1-11: fail  (55%)
12-18: success (35%)
19: narration (5%)
20: roll again, odd: bad karma (2.5%), even: contact (2.5%)

which compares to a 5-player game with a bag of:

fail (55%)
success (35%)
narration (5%)
contact (3%)
bad karma (2%)

pretty darn close.

I can't see any rules for how the bag refreshes, so if it refreshes automatically, then all you're really doing is stripping out the need to buy a bunch of stones to play and a little bit of statistical tomfoolery.

If the bag doesn't refresh until depleted, then true, you can get some really wonky distributions when the bag is near gone (and reward people who count tiles), and you also guarantee that every tile will come out, but I haven't been able to find, reading through the threads, any reason why those odd low-bag distributions are desired.

In any case, it's hard to evaluate the set of mechanics until that refresh rule is there.

[Tobias]

On the refresh rule - looks like I left it out of the core rules. My fault.

The tiles go back after each draw, yes.

Yes, could model that with dice as well - in fact, the system is a tweak from rolling d10's on an purely skill-dots based system. Why then use the bag, and not dice? Well, what's so hot about dice?

I had written a fairly long bit on dice vs. stones, player familiarity, cost, etc., but in the end I snipped it because what really matters to me is:

1. I like the cool effect of going into the bag and quickly seeing by color how many successes or special stones you have. Also, my players seem to trigger fairly well on trying to get bonuses to get a nice big hand to draw - thus trying to get the bonuses for using Trademarks and a bit longer description of their action.

2. The bag is not static - it changes over time and allows tweaks and 'easter eggs' that would be more difficult to model with dice. Player's reaching their goals means special tiles into the bag. Global effects or faction goals can also be put in the bag, allowing backstory to develop at the same time. If the play group dislikes the amount of sucesses during normal play (Whiff factor, etc.), it's really easy to just add or removed about 5 red stones, etc.

Of course, if you like dice and would prefer to play with them instead of the bag, well, you've already proven you could easily tweak it to your own preference - that's great, go ahead and do so. I understand not using dice means I will lose some interest - I'm ok with that. I hope it will also gain me some interest from those interested in trying something new.

I also note a fairly important error in the text. It has:

•   Gold / Contact stone – the character making the draw gets contact, if the action was in line with a player's Value or Role. (S)he also gains a point of Karma.

This should read:

•   Gold / Contact stone – the character making the draw gets contact. If the action was in line with a player's Value or Role, (s)he also gains a point of Karma.

But thanks for having a look! When I 'release' this, I was planning on having a number of small articles about the game on a site somewhere - and changing over to dice might be a good one to have.

[statisticaltomfoolery]

Well, what's so hot about dice?

Well, it's that everybody has them, as you almost certainly wrote already. But putting this aside for the moment, I think the refresh rule, while expected, is not necessarily the most interesting way to proceed.

The problem is that with 100 tiles, and probably no more than 10 draws at any time, instantly refreshed, it's not much more than "dice, but not rolling". There are some slight variances in the probability, in that any extreme result is slightly less likely, but we're talking slight here.


There's something really interesting (basing off the karma concept you have), I think, that could be accomplished by taking the bag size down to a very low number, say 20-30 (also reduces the necessary number of components), not refreshing until the bag is depleted.  Now, the kicker is that you enable a whole series of actions which enable the players and GM to manipulate the bag. Didn't like your draw? Well, feel free to draw again: just permanently remove a success token from the bag. If players do action X, then introduce one more contact token into the bag.

I think the idea of a relatively basic resolution system, but with the goal that players want to manipulate the 'random' aspect into being as favorable as possible can be made pretty darn interesting (especially if you introduce lots more types of tiles), and also has the side effect of completely justifying why this isn't just dice with different bits.

What do you think?

[statisticaltomfoolery]

To be clearer on what I think the potential is here,  the opportunity for a system where certain types of successes are useful for certain types of actions, or certain tiles are useful only for certain players is a pretty fertile idea.

[Tobias]

Messing with the bag IS just 'diceless dice' - unless you do what I mentioned with tuning, tweaking, and custom tiles. I won't deny that, nor that most gamers will already have d10s. It's a different type of interface, one that has a few (potential) features that I like.

I will tell you honestly that there's too much going on in my life right now to get a 'do not replace until exhausted' version of the bag into life - but I agree with you that that is a very interesting possibility of the bag that could be exploited. Possibly I will hash that out once the core version is done. Right now I'm much more interested in how the WW (my version of Relationship Map) will appeal to players and how much of the stucturing I do without thinking about it I need to translate into rules for the new user.

Thanks for the comments though - If I sound negative, I don't mean to be, it's just that time issues force me to confine myself to what is possible, and I'd prefer to be honest about that.