Limitless: Does this game do what it sets out to?

[Shreyas Sampat]

As an experiment, I am going to provide here the draft rules of a game, reserving their design notes. (I'll post those later.) Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to predict what gameplay will look like—what emergent effects do the rules bring about? For instance, Shadows' token rule has the emergent effect that the player who best knows what the other players do not want can completely dominate the token economy and thus control the game.

Playing Limitless
To play Limitless, you need several players, each of whom will be responsible for at least one character. You may wish to give one player the responsibility of refereeing; in this case, this player is responsible for "incidental" characters, setting stages, rules interpretation, and so on. All significant characters should be played by non-referee players. You will also need some way to record characters (a Wiki would be nice; Limitless characters fluctuate rapidly, so paper sheets may become unwieldy) and a large number of six-sided dice. If you prefer, use a large number of small tokens, like pennies, and a small handful of dice.

Characters in Limitless
The characters of Limitless interact with the world through a variety of Methods. All characters have access to five standard Methods:

[*]Battle affects the world through physical action.
[*]Influence affects the world through use of authority.
[*]Lore affects the world through application of knowledge.
[*]Intrigue affects the world by moving others to action, outside the normal social hierarchy.
[*]Romance affects the world by giving things significance.[/list:u]
Some characters may have idiosyncratic Methods, which are generally narrower in scope. Most commonly, an idiosyncratic Method is a specific instance of a common Method (Lore > Symbologic Genetics; Intrigue > Tarot Reading, Insidious Pheromones; Battle > Decoherence Scimitar Combat). More rarely, one of these Methods is specifically not a specific instance of a larger Method (Black Circle Methodology affects the world by altering physical laws; Bending Diamond Initiation affects the world by manipulating time.)

In addition to their Methods, some characters have Secret Teachings (intermin terminology). These "link" two Methods, creating a network. More on this later.

More importantly, a character has a set of Passions—events that he strongly wants to occur. In the character record, a Passion is shown as the title of a document, a subtitle describing the target the Passion is related to, and finally a table of contents, which lists Events which lead up to the final goal.

Creating Characters
You have five Method Points. You can spend an MP to learn a Secret Teaching, or learn a new idiosyncratic Method. When you buy a new "subset" Method, you get a free Secret Teaching that links it with its superset.

Then you have twenty Events. Distribute these between any number of Passions as  you like; each Event is something that happened in the past that has something to do with you achieving your Passion. All of these are one-point Events. More on this later.

Finally, you may add a pair of Events, one a one-point positive Event and one a one-point negative Event, to each Passion.

You must create Passions in a group, ensuring that every Passion is mutually exclusive with a Passion some other character has. You may deliberately select the same Passion as another character, as well.

Playing Limitless
Limitless is played in a series of scenes, which are either Confrontation scenes, where two or more characters come into conflict, or Karma scenes, where we see the results of action.

Actions are always resolved by rolling a number of six-sided dice. Discard all of the 4s, 5s, and 6s rolled, and total up the pips on the dice that remain. The result is the number of Victories the character has earned; the number of Victories is a rough measure of how much a particular action affects the world.

Confrontations
When two or more characters come into conflict, a Confrontation can be used to decide which character gets his way. Both state their goal in the Confrontation, and then find the number of Victories needed to realize that goal (This calculation isn't important for our purposes). Next, decide what Method the characters are employing to contend with one another. They must use the same Method. A Confrontation begins with Significance 1.

Then, the Confrontation begins in earnest. It happens over a series of Exchanges, which are as follows:

[*]The players place one die on each of their Methods.
[*]The players describe their characters' actions. If a character has a Passion relevant to this Confrontation, then the player may make reference to one of the positive Events in this Passion as part of the narration; this nets him a bonus number of dice equal to the Event's rating. A player may modify his opponent's narration to incorporate one of the character's negative Events; this causes him to lose as many dice as the Event's rating.
[*]Once an Event has been referenced in a Confrontation, it may not be referenced again in the same Confrontation.
[*]The players may take as many dice as they like from the operative Method, plus one from any linked Methods, to distribute among actions they are performing in this Exchange. A list of actions appears below.
[*]Determine the result of actions.[/list:u]When one of the characters accumulates enough Victories to obtain his goal, the Confrontation ends.

Goals
A goal, once accomplished, is recorded on one or another's character sheet as an Event with a rating equal to the Significance of the Confrontation that brought it about. These events also affect the game world!

Actions
Here are several different actions that a character could take in an exchange:

[*]Accomplish: The player rolls as many dice as were allocated to this action, and takes the same number of Karma dice. The victories on this action are devoted to accomplishing the character's goal.
[*]Desperately Accomplish: Identical to Accomplish, but any Events you referred to this turn are not used up, and double the amount of Karma dice you receive.
[*]Tragically Accomplish: Identical to Accomplish, but double the dice rolled for this action, and take all Karma dice from the other characters, adding them to your own.
[*]Prevent: The player rolls as many dice as he allocated to this action, and subtracts the number of victories from the victories another character received for some action in this Exchange.
[*]Prevent and Counter: Identical to Prevent, but if you receive more victories than the action you are trying to Prevent, you must roll as many dice as the difference, toward your own goal, and gain twice that amount of Karma dice.
[*]Shift Focus: The player must allocate as many dice to this as the Confrontation's current Significance, and receives an equal number of Karma dice. He determines a subordinate goal; from now until the character accomplishes that goal, his victories go to accomplishing this subordinate goal instead of the main goal. When the subordinate goal is accomplished, the confrontation does not end; it resumes service to the main.
[*]Escalate: The player must allocate as many dice to this as the Confrontation's current Significance, and recieves an equal number of Karma dice. If the other players involved do not agree, they may concede the Confrontation. In this case, the Escalating character's goal is realized, with the new Significance level. If the other players do agree to Escalate, increase the Confrontation's Significance by 1. In addition, the Escalating player may choose to move the Confrontation into a different Method; this must still be a Method which all the characters involved possess.
[*]Ameliorate: The player rolls as many dice as he allocated to this Action. He reduces his Karma accumulation by half the number of victories, rounded down.[/list:u]Karma
At the end of a Confrontation, roll each character's Karma dice. The players work together to decide an Event of the appropriate magnitude, which happens to the character. This Event is some backlash from the character's actions. In a Karma scene, narrate the event taking place. This may happen in the present of the game, the past, or even the future! It doesn't really matter; what matters is that this Event, like any other, will be recorded on some Passion's chronicle somewhere.

[TonyLB]

Next, decide what Method the characters are employing to contend with one another. They must use the same Method.

They're likely to disagree about what Method to use, aren't they?  How does that get resolved?

[inky]

You have five Method Points. You can spend an MP to learn a Secret Teaching, or learn a new idiosyncratic Method. When you buy a new "subset" Method, you get a free Secret Teaching that links it with its superset.

Aren't links between the standard five methods strictly better than links to an idiosyncratic method? It seems like the only use for links is to transfer dice during an exchange, and if you link, I dunno, Battle and Lore, you can transfer dice (ie, get a die) whenever the Method of the conflict is Battle or Lore; if you link Battle and Dazzling Symbol of the Crescent you get a die whenever Battle or DSOTC is the conflict's Method, but since your opponent is unlikely to have DSOTC, in practice this means you only get a die when Battle is the Method.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Tony:
Hm! I guess I left that out of the post. My unstated assumption was that the initiator of the Confrontation gets to decide this, or that the referee would do so. The Method-switch option in Escalation makes it possible for disagreements on Method to be resolved Confrontation-internally.

I don't want a situation where one can simply overturn an Escalation by Escalating again, though. So we'll add a rule—you can't Escalate into a Method you just Escalated out of.

Dan:
Yes, they are. Once I put together rules for exactly what you can accomplish with the various Methods, this differential may become less extreme; basically, the "subset" idiosyncratic Methods make you better at one kind of confrontation, while unique Methods make it possible for you to actually do things you cannot normally do, while links not  only increase your effectiveness but also (given new accomplishment rules) will allow a limited decoupling of methods and results.

[Jonathan Walton]

I don't want a situation where one can simply overturn an Escalation by Escalating again, though. So we'll add a rule—you can't Escalate into a Method you just Escalated out of.

But, for elegance, you should be able to Escalate in a circle and return to where you started.  You could chart this by making 5 points on a piece of paper and then connecting the dots.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Another thing I missed—Escalating refreshes (some of?) your memories, so you can reuse them in the same confrontation. The point of this is that you can accomplish really huge things by escalating a confrontation, but only at a massive cost to yourself.

[DevP]

Questions:
* why wouldn't a player have their Events & Passions distributed thinly, so they could have wide passion coverage? Or, why not rather unitary, overarching passions?
* "The players place one die on each of their Methods. " Do you mean all methods that are in play, or absolutely all methods? (So does my totally unlinked "Hacker-Destroyer of the Seven Suns" Method just rack up dice, never to be tapped?)
* The operative method doesn't change without escalation; is this a too-slow method of building up your dice? (Esp. since you can only draw 1 from linked Methods.)
* Do links of 2nd-order or higher still count?
* When you say "allocate", for Ameilorate or Escalation, is that simply flatrate paying from the pool, or actually rolling?
* What does Ameilorate mean, in terms of a character's narrated action?

Also:
* could I convince you to (eventually) come up with a clever rhyme to sum up the cost and effect of the different actions?

The tactics of this are complex, so good for you! There's depth in *when* a player (or rival) should invoke the events. It would seem that the most-linked player can probably win (the most dice to continually draw from), but: to get links between the main Methods (the ones most likely to be shared and therefore a hub of conflict), you need to pay your MP for Secret Teachings - which is resources you're *not* spending on the Idiosyncratic Method and the free link that gives you. So, you're making a choice between flexibility (you could spend MP or linking up maximally, so you can always draw on most of you methods) or power (just burn all 5 MP or many Indiosycratic Methods of Battle and destruction). You're a clever dude.

Still, players may still wish for some chargeup time, since they're allocating 1/die per turn (and can use 1/die per turn), and I'm not sure if that's desirable. (Or, if both overexpend themselves, does a bunch more waiting in the middle of the combat make sense?)

Thanks. I'd love to try this out sometime. You're in Jersey soon, right? <g>

[Shreyas Sampat]

* This is a character concept choice, I think. Since only one Passion operates in any given confrontation, the character with many Passions is going to need to Escalate a lot if he wants to keep up with the more focused characters, to refresh his Events and reuse them. Meanwhile, the character with a large, overarching Passion can move in slower ways, since he has this wealth of Events to throw at any problem he'll be involved in. (Which perhaps seems sort of the reverse of what would be expected!)
* Absolutely all methods. This matters when you're doing things like Escalating, because you can Escalate to a pool you don't have any links onto, just for the large accumulation of dice that have built up there.
* This is a good question. I think it could use some testing...
* Originally, you could, as one step in the turn, move one die from a Method onto any Method it was linked to, so 2nd-order links could help you out by supplying dice that accumulate on a Method which you can Escalate to later, or maybe take a special action to draw additional dice from. I didn't think this was particularly elegant.
* Yeah, this is just a flat cost in dice.
* It doesn't need to mean anything specific, but I'm thinking about a little voice-over where the character explains that he's worried about how some other character may react, and rationalizing away his action..,

Also:
* Holy guacamole. I'm terrified of rhymes.

I'm kind of thinking that Events will make it possible to start fights with a positive dice flow, if you only use your Event dice and allow Method dice to accumulate in your pools; this might not work for everyone, but I feel like it's genre-enforcing. Only time will tell.

Thanks for the compliments, dude! I'll probably be heading back to Jersey for Thanksgiving and holiday break...we could try this out then.

[DevP]

* Holy guacamole. I'm terrified of rhymes.

Okay, I do rhymes of varying quality. Ping me if its what's called for.

Speaking of aesthetics: this is a case where a well-designed character sheet template good go a far way - or even most of the way - towards getting the rules accross.

...2nd-order links...

"Daisy-chaining" a bunch of methods together with links is still useful, because you can escalate along the linked skills, and still access a bunch of methods. Also, I realize that 2nd-order links being totally available is problematic (give Battle and Lore a bunch of IM's; if you're using 2nd order links, than a conflict in either one means you have excessive resources easily available, and it's *less* interesting). Punt this issue until playtest reveals some tactical issues, like (perhaps) needing more dice.

I'm kind of thinking that Events will make it possible to start fights with a positive dice flow, if you only use your Event dice and allow Method dice to accumulate in your pools

So, you'll probably see a first few terms of Prevent actions powered by Events, with dice building up for later. Considering when Events would come up - in a massive torrent in the beginning, stretching out the "dry" spots in the middle where both sides have overspent, or in a massive finishing blow - I think its a good storywise/choreographical fit best in the latter two cases, but not *necessarily* in the first one, if beginning a fight with major flashbacks is indeed a popular strategy.

Minor semantic question: what if Events, as triggered, add to your dice pool (for example, all in any single Method of your choice?) and can be used or not as you wish? The same tactic - using Events to add to your dice use this round - is still possible, but you can *also* use this to more quickly build up your pool. So, this is something to consider if dice-buildup is desired. (But then again, your way is Events = bonus dice = spent instantly = no hoarding = Events don't totally dominate who wins.) Especially if Events you consider the option above, I'd be careful about letting any Events refresh. (Maybe just a single Event of the non-escalator's choosing?)

[Shreyas Sampat]

Just one quick thought:

I hadn't considered too deeply how Events were meant to apply. Way, way back when they were just a twinkle in my eye, I was like, "This is a good way to reward the kind of narration I want." Much like GM dice in The Pool or whatever, your actions can turn Event dice into a resource to hoard...through some kind of weird action type, I guess...but the immediacy of the award is important.

I'm thinking that Events are better characterized as Images...striking sights that stand out in your character's memory, that your future actions can then make visual puns on...

Among the boughs a flask of wine...
         ...A blood-dripping spear severing flowers.

Sumer, like a white sword, hangs over my country...
         ...Pulling a white-hot poker from the smithy's hearth.

It might be good that Events don't drop straight into your dice pool automatically. It's possible that confrontations will have to start with more dice...playtest will bear it out.