[Shadowplay]: On going somewhere and ending where you began

[Black Iris Dancer]

Hello again,

The story begins like this: sometime ago, some friends and I began working on a small project (hah). Our goal was to develop a lightweight system for playing normal people, atop which we could layer Twilight, a game trafficking in legends and dreams. I started with some vague ideas about a system with pretty loose Traits, but stumbled at the point where it came to bringing them into play in a reasonable way. In the end, we ended up with a pretty traditional-looking system, with what amounted to deeply nested skills.

I made a few characters with this system. And put simply, it sortof sucked. I had these interesting, vibrant characters in mind, and they just fell flat on paper. They became a collection of their skills and bodies and traits. Quite disappointing.

So I mentally scrapped it, and redesigned pretty much the whole thing. I took some aspects of the old system, twisted them around a bit, and came up with something I like a lot more. It's significantly simpler. Moreover, I kept an eye to how game flow is maintained while developing the mechanics. Every dice roll means something, and every die can (indeed, more or less has to) affect the flow of the story. Characters now jump off the sheet, and in the very, very limited playtest we just ran (earlier today, after a night of no sleep hacking on this), things ran remarkably smoothly. I have a few more thoughts and questions on that (but not enough, I don't think, to drop this into the “Actual Play” forum quite yet), but first, I should probably outline the system, eh?

Anatomy of a Shadowplay Character

Characters in Shadowplay don't have very much on their sheet. Primarily, they have Features. These are the relevant, interesting traits of the character. They're written in the first person, because that comes out sounding pretty cool. Some examples:

 

[*]I kill people.
 [*]I drive really fast.
 [*]I can hide anything anywhere.
 [*]I am a demon with a lockpick.
 [*]I get into places I shouldn't be able to.
 [*]I'm paranoid.
 [*]I have breasts.[/list:u]
Features have ratings from 1 to 3. (You might, for example, have “I kill people” at 2). Characters start with 25 points in Features (though this might go up, depending on how future playtests go). Features have a cost associated with their flexibility and vagueness:[list=1]
 [*]Limited in usefulness, pretty much a single trick. (“I play DDR really well,” “I know philosophy”
 [*]Applicable in a number of varied situations. (“I kill people,” “I can hide anything anywhere”)
 [*]Useful in an extremely broad range of situations. (“I get into fights,” “I speak well”)[/list:o]
It's fairly subjective, but in our admittedly limited testing, there was very limited disagreement about what Features went where. This is one point we might wish to refine further.

Characters also have Motivations, which are broken into Drives and Urges. Drives are the things that connect the character to the world, engage her in life and such. Urges are things that she wants and needs, largely irrespective of anything else. The divide isn't necessarily positive/negative—you could have a Drive to kill the six-fingered man who killed your father, and an Urge to, I dunno, pet kittens. It's just that you're going to be pretty unhealthy of your petting of kittens—you must pet kittens every so often, you feel compelled to do so, not because you like felines, but just because… you're fucked up. After a while, if you don't get in a good kitten pet, your hands start to twitch (and your target numbers go up). Your Drive to kill the six-fingered man, on the other hand, inspires you to train for years at swordplay and better yourself so you can find the bastard and kill him. Drives and Urges are rated from 1 to 3 (indicating their importance to your character), and characters start with 7 points to spread between them.

Characters do have health. We didn't get into it in our limited system test, but my thought is, people can take 5 injuries before they're pretty much deceased. Why bring health into it at all? Because of how the rest of the system works, really. Suffice for the moment to say that if you get all your limbs chopped off, it's really appropriate in pretty much every sense for you to be bleeding to death, even if nobody was really trying to kill you, per se. Injuries are recorded descriptively (there will probably be lines for players to write them in).

There also exists a Drama pool, another thing we didn't get to in our very limited test. For just damn good narration, the GM can award players Drama points, generally three at the most.

Finally, characters have stuff. Stuff is actually handled in pretty much the same way as characters—it has Features. A gun might have “Silent”, for example. My secretary-spy character had a handbag with the feature “Smile! You're on a hidden camera.”

How it plays

Play progresses in a pretty familiar way to start. The GM outlines a scene, provides some detail about what's going on, then hands narration off to the players. The players, in turn, narrate their characters, and the GM settles back into providing flavor bits and running NPCs. If nobody at the table has a problem with anything anyone else is narrating, this is how the entire session runs. Back in the real world, conflicts will emerge. This guy wants to kill you. Well, okay, but I don't want him to kill me. And then we break the dice out.

The challenger narrates how some particular Feature or set of Features of her character (or something in the environment, if the challenger is the GM) opposes the initiator's action action. She rolls a number of d10's equal to her rating in that Feature to garner successes (target number is 5, 10s re-roll). She can put forth as many successes as she likes—at least one—to challenge. The initiator now has a few options. He can succumb, accepting her new narration. Alternately, he can put up Features in response, rolling them, and plunking down at least as many successes as her while narrating how his character actually struggles through. If he spends an equal number of successes, he merely defrays her attempt to stop him from accomplishing his goal. If he spends more, he not only defrays it, but offers a rebuttal, making progress towards his goal. The challenger can then respond with further successes, bringing in more Features if she likes. This continues until one party gives up, or runs out of successes and Features to bid, and thus the other party reaches their goal by default.

Players should make their character's goals clear through narration. The thing I really like about this is that you can narrate at exactly the level of specificity you want. If what you care about is, “Picking this lock before the guards get here,” you're rolling for and narrating that. If what you care about is “Getting into this fortress unnoticed” then your narration centers on that, and picking the lock is just something that might happen along the way.

Drives can be brought into a scene just like Features. “The man in the black mask is my only hope for revenge. I must find him.” Urges can be brought in, but only in scenes where they're directly relevant—the subject of your urge must be immediately present, or very close to it (“Heroin! Over there! Must… have…”). When Urges are brought in, they give you a number of successes equal to their rating, rather than dice. We like our characters a little screwed up around here.

Drives can be sacrificed. Maybe you're delivering the killing blow against the six-fingered man, maybe you've decided that after this motivational speech, you give up—just can't care this much anymore. Regardless, when Drives are sacrificed, you get a number of successes equal to twice their rating.

Drama can be spent as successes in any situation. It persists across sessions.

How it worked, and the problems I'm having

Us.

Probably the biggest problem we had was… ourselves. Our habit to, “roll something, examine the dice, look expectantly at the GM” was so ingrained that it took a while before everyone, myself included, got in the swing of just doing stuff and challenging and spending successes when appropriate. By the end, though, things were working fairly smoothly.

“I'm smart, I'm quick on my feet, and I kill people…” * rolls * “…but not in this scene, apparently.

Another non-trivial problem is that, hey, what happens when you just fail a roll? You've already narrated what's happening, and so then there's this awkward moment of, “or, I guess it doesn't…” I think it would be wise to move narration to post-roll, so you just bring in Features until you hit some successes to work with. On the downside, that still seems a bit frustrating and disruptive if the player's rolling badly that night. The whole point here is to minimize the amount of time spent dealing with the mechanics and maximize the effect of each roll. If some rolls are just worthless, it seems like we've not really accomplished that. I have a few ideas on how to fix this:[list=1]
 [*]Lose target numbers / successes. You have dice, from your roll,   and you push as many of those forward as you want. To counter, you push dice summing to a higher value forward. This is okay, but honestly, I'd rather not be adding. I'm perfectly good at adding, but counting has rather less mental overhead, and doesn't really require thought. (“here, have three red things. ooh, you counter with three red things…”) Also, it's possible that some goals (and thus, some success pools) will persist across multiple sessions. It's rather more of a pain to record dice values than it is to mark off successes.
 [*]Lose failures. Or, rather, let players spend two failures as if they're a single success. This seems better than option 1, but it starts to get into currency-trading a bit much for me, especially when supernatural dice come into play.
 [*]Get some successes for free. I'm probably most amenable to this option. Whenever you bring in a Feature or Drive, you get some successes, in addition to your dice. Possibly, you get as many successes as you have points in that Feature or Drive. Urges would then give you two successes per point when applied.
 [*]Lose dice. And just have the successes automatically applied from (3). I don't really like this, though, because I like the element of chance. As Ron put it somewhere, the dice have the power to say, “see these? these says that this is the scene where your hero gets kicked to the curb.” Or the opposite.[/list:o]
I think of the options, I'm leaning towards (3) the most. Whenever you bring in a Feature, you get some successes to play with, regardless. It's still not limitless, and there's still a good degree of chance, but at least you're not sitting there, bringing in Features that fail to “work,” somehow.

“I play chess. So I think about the movement of the cars as chess pieces and push a bold attack down the center of the board, accelerating to 90.”

We decided before our little playtest that the GM can, officially, veto the use of a Feature if its use in a situation just doesn't fit the game. This should be very infrequent. I'm leery of this, but I can understand the argument for it. The canonical example that we batted about was the Feature, “I'm good at chess” being used to drive through painful traffic (all the lane changes… they're like chess moves), or beat someone at fencing. The GM can also, alternately, half-veto a Feature—it can still be brought in, but its successes are cut in half.

I have some issues with this, not the least of which is that there's the potential for just flat-out argument when a Feature is said not to apply. One solution that popped to mind is this: when some party in a conflict thinks a Feature doesn't apply, they can spend some Drama points to reduce its effectiveness. They must spend at least one to render it only half-relevant, and two to say it can't come in at all. This applies to the GM as well, who gets Drama from the players for the same sorts of things that players get it for—really evocative, powerful GM'ing, essentially. When someone calls B.S., they roll a number of d10 equal to the number of Drama points they spent. On at least a success, their call stands.

Alternately, we can just say that you can't veto Features. If the player can narrate their use, they can come in, and if you don't like it, you can blow them out of the water with Drama points. This might really amount to much the same system as described in the previous paragraph.

Finally, I'd like negative Features to play into this in some way. I think I'd like for other characters to be able to use your negative Features against you, gaining dice for them. As recompense, a character ganked by a negative feature in one scene gets its rating in Drama points in the next. The problem is how to manage this logistically—how does everyone else know about negative features? We could, I suppose, write them on note cards and have them sitting in front of your sheet, but it's not clear that we want negative features to be that open (maybe someone has a negative Feature, ‧I have a dark secret—I kill puppies” or something). Also, notecards seem rather artificial, and prone to loss. Alternately, we can say that it's entirely up to the player what negative features she wants to advertise, through narration (“Glancing closer at my face, you notice that one of my eyes is milky-white and doesn't focus quite right.”). If she doesn't advertise them at all, ever, they never give her Drama points.

Okay, that was long and probably vaguely incoherent. Still, if anyone can stumble through it, I'd be interested in what you think, especially regarding the changes I have in mind.