Game in Search of Dice Mechanic, Likes Pina Coladas

[Shreyas Sampat]

Short post, more when I get back from club meetings.

Imagine that you know nothing about Dune. Nothing about wuxia. Will this game generate Dune-wuxia for you? If it doesn't, it's missing something.

The complexity here isn't complex for the sake of complex. It's complex so it doesn't need to lean on player knowledge and player goals to create the game that I want it to create.

[Jonathan Walton]

Another thought to throw into the mix, before we start getting at the nitty-gritty:

Wuxia and Dune, in my mind, are both about scene framing.  I mean, TWO very cinematic genres here.  Heavy imagery, but carefully chosen imagery that supports the ultimate goal of the story.

So here's what you have to do (which no one outside of Uni and MLwM has done yet, and you're going to have to do it very differently): tie the conflict mechanics into some sort of scene framing guidelines.  You have all this back and forth, move and counter stuff, right?  Well turn those into camera shots instead of "turns."  And have the mechanics tell you what kind of shot it should be.  Have the mechanics actually serve as cinematographer and the player be the director and actors.

So you have the two characters dash into each other, and somehow get a result like "Close Up - Detail - Tragic," so the player narrates:

Tsang's laser knife misses Wu's face by a hair's breadth, but the tip catches a single whisp of her hair, which floats silently down to fall at her feet, smelling like old scorched love.

Maybe the result gives you distance (of the camera), subject, and then a passion or other trait that the result is related to.  So you don't get a "win/lose" result.  You just get the directions for a camera shot and a player to narrate it (the "winner").  Creative players would learn the power of narrating their own failure or other less straight-forward results.  This, in my mind, works sort of like the scene significance guidelines in Primetime Adventures, except on an inter-scene basis.  Instead of telling you what characters will be important in a given scene, making sure that everyone has a chance to shine, it gives you a mixture of different kinds of camera shots and different traits within the same scene, so you end up with a something that feels "balanced" and "directed," even though there might not be actual controlling factors besides Fortune and the players' imaginations.

Damn that's a hot idea.  If you don't use it for this, I'm going to steal it for another wuxia or cinematic game.

Just another thought.  More after my pi pa class.

[inky]

It seems to me that one of the things that defines the distinction between wuxia and, say, Dogs in the Vineyard is that not all wuxia conflicts are deeply fraught; there might be nasty emotional fallout from the argument over crossing the bridge, or they might just glare and move on (or this may be the start of a long respectful friendship -- hey, it worked for Robin Hood). You could, I guess, say that you're only going to play out the ones that are deeply passionate and hand-wave the rest, but that seems like it's missing some of the point -- if you don't enjoy the fights for their own sake, I don't think you're in the right genre.

[Doug Ruff]

Shreyas,

Looking at the way the thread's going, I'll skip on posting a detailed example combat for now. But I would like to comment on something you said earlier.

Now, how does this joint in with everything else? Throw out the idea of Harmony. This is all about to be about disharmony. (It is also about to get really mechanically widgety.)

I think this is the reason that there should be a Harmony rating in the game - it gives the characters something they can lose.

The way I see it, these characters are going to get into a lot of conflicts, and conflict is the opposite of Harmony.

So, instead of using Harmony to refresh dice pools:

Characters have a starting Harmony level. Every time a character initiates, or loses a conflict, they lose Harmony. When Harmony reaches 0, something bad happens to the character.

Harmony can be restored, but this should be set up so that players lose more Harmony than they gain - this is about a slow (or fast!) downward spiral.

If you add 'the cost of fu' as additional Harmony loss (for example, to activate Links), then I think that the downward spiral is guaranteed.

The only way to maintain Harmony is to avoid conflict, except this means giving way to your antagonists, who may deliberately provoke you.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Ok, detailed responses again.

Ben:
Let's put the issue of "traditional" resolution aside for a second&mdashthat's a red herring—and talk about the substantive part of your post.

When you say I'm using the decoupling of means and goals in order to produce a feeling of mastery, you are correct. What I want is to make differentials between who is how good at decoupling these things, which brings me back to identifying things by their means, in one way or another. You've convinced me, though, that I might not need to actually rate these means. For the moment, though, let's continue to assume that we do; I like to assemble a sort of hairy thicket of mechanics before trimming out the wayward growth. I'm going to need to think and talk about how we can make means-decoupling a parametric thing, without parametrizing the means themselves.

Jon:
I was thinking about the cinematic framing thing when I posted the example, interestingly enough. As for making the mechanics generate these framings, I don't really have a clear idea on how I would accomplish that, but I do have a small idea about how one would cast the players into the roles of cinematographers.

I'm thinking of ways to integrate this all into the mechanical framework I have, so I've got this idea that you have a palette of Moods, and each Mood, while having its roots in Color, takes its power from a Karma manipulation. Let's define Karma in this way: As a confrontation progresses, you approach your goal, and with each action, you accumulate a little bit of Karma. At the end of the confrontation, the players work together to devise some consequence of the appropriate magnitude.

So you've got a set of options like this:

[*]Ambitious: You recieve one Karma die per victory you earn in this exchange. (This is the default.)
[*]Tragic: You absorb all the Karma dice that has been accumulated in this confrontation thus far, as well as the standard one die per victory. In exchange, you double the dice pool for this turn's actions. (This is kind of a manipulation that operates on the players; it says, I accept the consequences of my actions and yours too.")
[*]Desperate: This turn, you may perform a shift of focus toward your operative Passion. All the dice you spend this turn are converted to Karma dice. (This basically means that you have to either accept a lot of Karma, or allow your opponent to get away with a lot this turn.)
[*]?: There probably need to be between five and ten of these for this mechanic to not only generate the necessary Color but also to be an interesting source of tactical complexity.[/list:u]
The bits about tightness of the shot, imagery that needs to be included, etc., are still percolating in my head. Very cool direction of development to explore, here.

Dan:
You can play out confrontations that you don't care too much about, but you will need to devote a good amount of your energy to replenishing your energy (as bizarre as that sounds), since you aren't powered by a Passion. I'm not sure I agree, though, that there are that many indulgent fights in wuxia; the ones I can think of are really actions of extremity. It just happens that wuxia characters are so extreme, so much of the time, that it begins to fade from your attention after a while. To paraphrase a lesson from Nobilis, if a fight comes to blows then you have already lost. Wuxia characters just lose before the story even begins.

Doug:
I'm trying to build this decline of harmony into the Karma system; persumably, your Passion total could be reduced as the result of a particularly stressful and demoralizing conflict, or one in which your reach exceeded your grasp too far.



So...I think this is all starting to coalesce. Once the Mood mechanic is jointed together right, and there's a good set of things you can do besides straight Accomplishments and Preventions, I suspect that this will actually be playable. Hmmm....