[Dirty Virgins] Starting Honour & Shame

[hix]

Dirty Virgins (which'll probably get renamed Desperate Virgins) is a game about maidens trying to sully their reputations before a dragon eats them in the morning. In a previous thread I figured out some stuff about how to determine which virgin gets eaten. I also said this:

Everyone starts with 30 Honour & 30 Shame.[/i]

I've started this thread because I'd like to know if I'm heading in a direction that'll create game balance while allowing a variety of tactical options from the players.

In Dirty Virgins, the character with the highest Honour at the end of the game gets eaten. Shame is a pool that you divide up into Shameful Acts. The more Shameful Acts you commit in the game, the more votes you have to increase other virgins' Honour.

Something about starting everybody off at the same Honour & Shame didn't sit right with me. So I've gone back and experimented with the original idea of allowing players to set it for themselves on a sliding scale, from 1Honour / 59 Shame to 59 Honour / 1 Shame.*

That seems to provide a whole bunch of tactical options. Setting your Honour low gives you less votes, initially makes you less likely to be eaten but also makes you a target.  Likewise, setting your Honour extremely high gives you voting immunity to start with - immunity that may or may not be end up being contested, if my solo play tests are anything to go by.  People in the middle ground seemed to get more votes than people at the extremes, which gives them their own edge.

My question is - have I overlooked some optimal min-maxing setting that smart players should choose?  See, I want this game to be balanced, with a variety of evenly-matched strategies that could lead to success.

* I also might go back to having 40 points to allocate between Honour & Shame (thanks for the terms, Jason Morningstar, they are awesome), because the game seems like it might run a little long at 60.

[TonyLB]

I think you're capitalizing nicely (and explicitly!) on the notion that players gang up on the person who appears closest to winning the game.  Because you are closest to winning the game when you have least ability to proceed toward that goal (and most ability to be slammed) I think you're going to get some wonderfully Survivoresque situations of betrayal, group dysfunction and manipulation.

Do you want to encourage a totally non-binding round of people making promises to each other about the way they'll vote?  I mean, that's half the fun of Survivor, after all ... and you could definitely do worse than steal what they do well.

[hix]

At the moment, I have a 'free and clear' phase where people can discuss anything they want about the voting - including proposing alliances & all that other Survivor goodness. I absolutely think that conversation is necessary to the game - although I should push your "totally non-binding round of people making promises to each other about the way they'll vote" concept a bit more forcefully in the next draft.

All of that, though, is currently part of a single discussion that happens face-to-face at the table. Were you thinking more of a classic 'everyone goes off for a bit and talks in their little huddles' Survivor + Diplomacy phase?

[TonyLB]

Oh, absolutely.  It serves a dual purpose:  alliance-building and gossip about the shameful things the virgins have been doing, and are secretly proud of.

In fact, come to think about it, alliance building and gossip are really the same thing in this game, aren't they?

[Sydney Freedberg]

I've been pondering this game for a while, struggling with why I wanted so much to love it and couldn't, and I think I've figured out why, but I think it's at a deeper level than the Honor/Shame mechanics (cool as they are). So I'm gonna kick over the table here.

What I love: the freakin' beautiful concept. Everyone realizes this game is hardcore feminist satire, right? I keep imagining the Town Fathers explaining the situation the day before, and a hard-eyed virgin going, "Waitasec. So if I'm a really good girl and play by all your rules, I get to be eaten alive by a what?" (Plus the added tragedy that, as always, the incentive for the oppressed to band together is outweighed by the incentive to throw one another to the wolves). N.B. that you should never say this explicitly in the rules! Let players figure it out for themselves.

What I don't love: the mechanics are really linear. I know, I know, there's a tradeoff between Shame and Honor, plus lots of room for interplayer intrigue -- but in the end, Honor kills you. So ultimately the game is a problem in maximizing a single value, which is (as I understand mathematics) by definition a solveable problem, which means a problem with a finite number of optimal solutions (maybe one, maybe several), which means any complications you create are just delaying the inevitable point when someone solves the equation and the game breaks.*

In other words, there's no Fruitful Void. As I said in that discussion on Vincent's blog:

Both Narrativism and Gamism strike me as "dilemma" play: if there's an obvious best answer (morally, for Narrativism; tactically, for Gamism), play dies; the enjoyment is in making difficult choices among equally valid but imperfect options. A Gamist design or scenario that had (explicit or implicit) a single optimal strategy would be the equivalent of a Narrativist game where the designer or GM had already answered the Premise....

The old Avalon Hill Panzerblitz and Squad Leader wargames had a core tactical dilemma of "do I move or do I shoot?" In Dogs in the Vineyard, the core moral dilemma is "do I escalate and risk hurting people worse, or do I give up on this moral point?" In Capes, it's "which Conflicts am I willing to lose to get more resources, and which Conflicts am I willing to spend resources to win?" These are all tradeoffs between two things that are (in general) equally desirable and which cannot, objectively, be converted into one another.** The tradeoff -- which of these two things am I willing to sacrifice for the other? -- cannot be objectively optimized in the general case, but can only be decided in a particular instance and, ultimately, subjectively: The "right choice" is hidden in the Fruitful Void. I don't think "Honor versus Shame" does this, yet.

And you see how (1) the biting satirical premise and (2) a real dilemma could work together? Currently, the game gives you one narrative goal -- "make sure I'm not the one eaten" -- and one mechanical goal -- "make sure my Honor score is as low as possible." But if you had real dilemma in the mechanics, it'd support real dilemmas in the story: "What 'shameful acts' really do shame me and make me less of a person, and which can I be proud of as gestures of defiance that make me more of a person?" and "am I willing to betray another victim of oppression to ensure my own survival? Okay, which sister will I backstab? And is there a sister I would rather die myself than betray?"

What you need may be some other mechanic orthogonal (to use Tony's favorite and very apt word) to the Honor-Shame tradeoff, or some other kind of scene besides the committing of shameful acts to give us another way to care about the characters, or both -- or something else entirely, of course. Maybe you can use the same elements if you come up with more ways of combining them.*** I'm all up on the deconstruction at the moment and not so insightful on the construction, I'm afraid.

Yes, I did just tell you to make radical changes to your game without actually saying how. Sorry. "You always hurt the ones you love."

Rant off, I think. Finicky footnotes follow.

*This is also my problem with Tobias op den Brouw's Golem vs Dragon, actually, although I didn't express it well enough in that thread.

** "But Capes is all about convertable resources (Debt/Story Tokens/Inspirations). Yes, BUT: For any given Conflict, you still have to decide whether the meaning of that Conflict in the story is worth sacrificing resources to win, or is worth sacrificing to get resources to win some other Conflict, either already on the table or hypothetical and yet to come. And no one can write an equation for "I care more about Conflict A than Conflict B." (This is why I've finally convinced myself that Capes is Narrativist first and Gamist secondarily and as a "supporting" mode. Ron, if I'm still not making sense, I give up).

*** What actually crystallized this in my mind, strangely enough, was reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, in which he argues that human language cannot be produced by a simple "chain" algorithm -- "if I say this phrase, then I can say any of these phrases next, which in turn can produce any of these phrases...." -- but has to be a set of finite elements operating under a finite set of rules which allows infinite recombinations (like DNA). Your game, and Tobias's, are still "chains," I think: A affects B affects C affects D and so on. What I want them to be is infinitely recombinable: A combines with B, or C, or D, or with B and C, or C and D, or B only, and so on and on and on and on. But of course what I want isn't the question, is it? It's what you want.

[hix]

Sydney, thanks for that. It's insightful stuff. Your observation about the core of the satire is something I hadn't even articulated to myself. I'm gunna have to take some time & digest it all.

The next area I was thinking of working on was enlivening the shared imaginary space. Your comments may tie into that. What I mean is that in both the current version & the proposed structure, there's a clear objective: not to get eaten. But ...

... in the current version, it's just a fun voting-off romp to see who does get eaten.
... in your proposed structure, there'd be difficult choices to make. Introducing concepts like friendship, loyalty (or whatever) make the resolution more meaningful. And that, I think, makes the game's SIS more vivid.

Which is exciting, but damn - I was hoping this'd be an easy to edit and publish kind of game. Now I'm having to think about it and stuff. :)

[Sydney Freedberg]

"Of course it's hard. The 'hard' is what makes it great. If it were easy, everyone would do it" -- A League of Their Own

I know the feeling. You & others (especially Unco Lober's group!) had strong positive responses to the current version of apocalypse girl, and most of the problems you identified would be easy to fix -- but to make it really do what I want it to do, I'm struggling to design a relationship-mapping mechanic.

And thanks for being gracious about my rant. Thinking about your game and Tobias's helped me form some ideas in my mind, and I unceremoniously dumped them all into your thread.

N.B.: Notice how making the fiction of the game richer is tied to making the mechanics more robust? Classic Forge theory in action.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Well, I think for it to be "realistic" I think that honour and shame should be the same stat...
  I mean, how could you be both shamed and honorable at the same time.
  Also, for this genre, seems like hour should go down as a character gains skill goes up...
  In the context of the situation as described, it seems like the there are a few solutions:
Lie - I'm not a virgin
Confess - Confess to secret affair with another villager
Get busy - Rectify the situation
Get married - I mean, the consumation is defense
Call daddy - Get some man in the community to stand up for you (Isn;t that the classic story, dozens of daughters get sacrificed until the kings daughter's name gets picked. Then a knight is engaged).
Volunteer - Think of it like collecting hearts in the card game of hearts...
  Just some ideas