Hello, and an interesting little mechanic / statistical observation

[Juan D. Six]

Hi, I'm new to the board. I've never produced a game, and odds-are I won't (rather a large investment of time and energy) but I've thought about it from time to time and enjoy playing with ideas: as they say, you don't really understand a thing until you can create it!

Here's the mechanic: roll a die, on a maximum roll, roll again and add the result. Repeat. For example

1D6R: 4 = 4.
1D6R: 6, then 4, = 10.
1D6R: 6, then 6, then 1 = 13.

Here's a graph of the probability of rolling on or above various numbers using 1D6R.



And an excel spreadsheet with the data is to be found here:

http://mindismoving.org/files/odds.xls

It's a really simple mechanic with a rather appealing curve.

With a D10R system, it's even easier: you're basically just rolling decimals:

8: 80%,
9: 90%,
10: 90%,
11: 91%
12: 92%
13: 93%
...
19: 99%
20: 99.1%

And so on. I'm sure it's been used before, although I can't think where offhand.

[Juan D. Six]

OOps, looks like this should have been over on Theory - sorry I hadn't read the stickies before posting.

Where I'm hoping to go, by the way, is a rules-lite framework for games set in the modern world but with occult elements: mostly-human players, and occasional squamous horrors at least supported by the rules, even if players choose not to use them.

The core feature I want to examine is the concept of fate: what draws "ordinary people" into extraordinary circumstances: in a division of fifty cops, why do two always seem to get to the homicides first? Why does *that* *paramedic* always seem to get the stabbings and not the grandmothers? The idea is that the game is *driven* by "The Call" - a sort of inner sense that characters have and are united by, and that (if you screw up) you can *lose* so that you no longer "just know."

Not terribly articulate, I'm afraid, I'm really just dusting off ideas!

[Eero Tuovinen]

First: welcome to the Forge, hope you enjoy your stay and find something useful. On to our scheduled program:

Hey, that sounds nifty, although indeed not very articulate. The literary problem you have is that fate is one of those mirror-image deals of philosophy: paper-thin, and there's really nothing else behind it. So I have difficulty seeing how one can examine fate in a game, or even a literary work; there's nothing more to say than either go all fatalistic or not. Is that your take? Let the player characters accept their fate or go against it?

To put the same more concretely: when you ask what draws a particular pair of cops to the homicide, are you planning to answer it ("He has the sign of the Elder Gods on him!"), or is that just color for the actual intention of ogling at how, well, this one pair of cops seem to strangely always happen on the scene first? If the former, then it's not about fate but about <insert your own whatever controls fate>, while the latter sounds more like a possible special effect for a horror mystery, but not particularly central.

Also, tell us more about how the above relates to the Call, which I understand to be the emphatic motivation, more or less, the will to help people. Am I in the ballpark here? That sounds like grounds for a really fun game of police and firemen and whatall, but I don't see how fate ties to it at all, not to talk of the occult elements and that stuff.

Your text certainly resonates for me, but I have difficulty seeing what level we're talking about here. Is this, like, the fiction at the beginning of the book which has jack-all to do with the game system? Like Whitewolf games where you have these people who hear moon radio channels or something, but the game's really not about radio broadcasting activity at all and it was all just random color thrown in to create mood? What kind of play interaction did you visualize that deals with the issues of fate and the Call?

As for the appropriate forum: yeah, Theory was the one, but we closed it down just a little while ago. Nowadays you don't post separate mechanics here at the Forge at all without intent to design or actual play experience to back it somehow. So it's either Indie Design or Actual Play for anybody wanting to discuss a game mechanic, and the onus is on them to figure out a way to shape their topic to the forum in question.

[Juan D. Six]

well, in that case ;-) I'll have to step up here. A goal: how's about a ten page treatment of the game idea by Xmas. I've got some free time and I'm in a productive phase ;-)

So here's specifically the question: why do some people get drawn into situations which cause them to become heros, and others with more talents and skills languish in obscurity forever? People who live on the front line again and again and again seem to have a feeling that some people are just "different" in a way which naturally draws them into more complex, fucked up situations. T.E. Lawrence talks about it a bit in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" which is, for my money, the closest thing to the real "Lord of the Rings" - an epic of adventure and hardship and personal heroism.

The other thing I want to focus on is the idea that *secrets*create*realities*. This draws from "Temporary Autonomous Zone" and the history of mystery religions and the occult. If you believe you know a secret about reality ("Mary was married to Jesus, and Fred-the-King is their Great^17th Power Grandchild") it creates a reality. If you know that same secret and don't believe it, you're outside of that bubble.

This is a little like "Rifts" or other games which feature the idea of Domains. The notion would be that players in "The Call" are representing people with three rare traits:


1> They have "The Call" - they "just know" when things are going to happen, and weird stuff is drawn into the world around them. Just like some people always date psychos, characters with The Call are always getting drawn into High Weirdness.

(this is a stab at mirroring "Murder She Wrote" or the "X-Files" serial drama)


2> They know a secret (or two) about Reality: they once saw a Ghoul, or their Aunt had terminal cancer and was healed by faith, or their Granduncle was a Guardian of the Holy Grail. Odds-are that a lot of these secrets are backed up by tanglble physical experiences rather than just being articles of faith.


3> They are motivated to Do Something. This is important: Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer have Global Doom as a motivator, but having all characters motivated by Global Doom leads to a weird kind of fascism in the game, a too-easy drawing of lines between good and evil. I wanted to try and get inside the idea that our culture is driven by many different kinds of personalities: the curious, the aggressive, the bored all contribute in their own ways.

This could open out into some kind of "Quest"-driven approach, or slide back into a one-word Motivation, but I think a little more thinking would open up a much more interesting link between The Call, The Secrets and The Drive.

More, as they say, later

[Juan D. Six]

The sort of notion here, by the way, is that Secrets are Big Deals, initiations. Once you know the Secret that demons are real, well then it's possible to summon them. You might still need to find the right book, and the right place and time, but you know it *can* be done, so you can try. Anybody who hasn't had hard proof doesn't know *for*sure* and so probably won't be able to do it. They'll be working from theory alone. But once you *KNOW* then, well, backtracking to figure out the theory seems a lot easier...

This sets up a nice scheme for occult character progression: you discover secrets, or have experiences with new things (implictly learning new Secrets) and this pushes you forward: yout start with a Minor Secret, say, that Elementals exist, and work upwards discovering new and strange things. Raid the abandoned church, wipe out the cultist and burn the place down before the demon gets out of the circle, and now you know that Demons are real and you've got a whole new pile of potentials and problems.

The downside, of course, is that Secrets have protectors, and implications, and perhaps you've really pried into Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and now somebody comes to kill you or induct you into some group with rules because, well, Now That You Know...

This, of course, factors into the background: lots of groups built around Their Secret, all convinced that Their Secret is the Big One, all trying to suppress open discover of their secret (keeps the Elites l33t), all trying to discover what other people know. An ideal "Secret Wars" background. Each secret is like a jewel, surrounded by a subsidiary knowledge base (like the setting of the stone) and then protected in a nice vault of lies and coercion: a Secret Society.

But that's not the point, that's not What Is Going On. That's just background. Sure, the world is a lot more complicated than it appears, and magic is sort-of real, but that's always been true. Characters get increasingly clued in to What Is Real, but it was all real before they discovered it and life goes on. The world of Secrets is transpersonal.

The *point* is "Why Me?" - that's what backtracks into this whole Call thing.

D&D and many other games assume that The Call is either chance - you happen to go on a Run and Mr Big is hiring idiots today - or it is assumed into the background "you are the Heir to the Throne of Blah Blah's Retainers" and off you go from there. Often *discovering* the reason for the adventure is half the adventure.

I want to take another path, working out from the assumption that some people really are just Weird Magnets. If anybody discovers a body on the nightshift, it's Sgt. Jones. Fred down at the Morgue always gets the weird ones. Sally dates psychos.

Of course, this goes further. My suggestion is that Fate is an active principle, and that Weird Magnet is the passive state of Fate: Fate that is asleep.

So the game starts when these Fated people become Active - their Fate finds it's Time, and things begin to roll forward.

Examples help: Mulder and Scully are Fated to help humanity vs. the Aliens. Ripley is Fated to be on the front lines of Human/Alien interaction. (once is coincidence, twice synchronicity, three times Fated action).

Fate then becomes a mechanic: a lot of it means a character keeps getting drawn back into the weirdness. Perhaps, if you play one way, you slowly dissipate the Fate, either by playing your role or fouling up so badly that there's no way for the Fate to express again (perhaps in another lifetime). Perhaps there's some kind of progress down a path, or towards a conclusion.

I like the approach of implicit and explicit: if a Character starts with five units of Fate, they start Implicit, hidden, unconscious. Gradually over the course of play those units of Potential turn into Reality: Fate turns into, say, Power or Knoweldge.

This is really something of a philosophical essay, an enquiry into the role of Adventure, into what pulls people in any Game - or in Life Itself - towards the interesting edges of things where the action is concentrated. Some of the most powerful characters (John Constantine, Batman) seem trapped, driven and unable to mature: the inability to *complete* keeps them circulating, adventuring, appearing in series after series.

T. E. Lawrence *wins* and then retires.

Fate completed.

[Ben Lehman]

Just as a note -- your graph and calculations are incorrent.  Under the system you described (let's say with a d10) you are no chance of ever rolling a 10.

If you read the die as 0-9, with 9s exploding, then you get something more like the resut you're looking for.

yrs--
--Ben

[Darren Hill]

The graph is actually correct - notice how the 6, 12, and 18 results aren't listed - the graph shows d6's.

The game Savage Worlds uses this mechanic. Depending on ability, characters have either d4, d6, d8 or d10 in their ability (or more than one) - roll and keep highest, which might actually be the d4 due to the open-ended roll.

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Juan --

I'll wade in with my .02, take what you will.  I think you don't need to look any further than:

So here's specifically the question: why do some people get drawn into situations which cause them to become heros, and others with more talents and skills languish in obscurity forever?

This says to me in big, screaming boldface letters that this game has to be about, and set during the time where the character(s) are feeling the call and making all of the tough choices on their road to becoming a hero.

Consider:

• Luke, right up until he fires the Photon Torpedoes at the Death Star
• Frank Black, right up until his (offscreen) psychotic break on Millenium
• Dale Cooper during season 1 of Twin Peaks (and a few bits of season 2, but let's be honest...)
• Jack Bristowe when he's acting out of love for his daughter on Alias

Those are just a few that popped to mind out of pop cul.

I think that if you marry this "early days" concept with the upper end of your die curve (where the slope starts to go really horizontal), you'll have an interesting game that's all about the failures that the character endures on the road to becoming a hero.

Or not.  There absolutely has to be a component of "losing the call".

[Juan D. Six]

I really like the angle you suggest about looking at Potential Heros! I think there's a *lot* of milage in that.

T.E. Lawrence talks over and over again about what drags him forward through hellish months on a camel when all around other English army officers are opting to stay at home and drink G&Ts. And it's fascinating. He's terrifying!

That's an angle: how that sense of destiny plays into what he did...

So I wonder about something like an initial quantity of Potential Fate which characters convert into *stuff* - either squandered through poor judgement - or it turns into real heroic traits or accomplishments.

Again, the Jungian / Gestalt idea that this *Potential* makes things weird - the unconscious potential for greatness manifests as pathologies like never fitting in, constantly craving something which doesn't seem to exist...

Then you [see the vampire / get drafted to Vietnam / lose your brother in a gun fight] and suddenly things begin to snap into focus...

I've seen people with heroic potential who didn't become heros and it kind of destroys them - very gung-ho former soliders who happened to serve during peace time and who will never know how they would have performed under fire, for example. That's another interesting aspect to this.

Here's a question: is The Call generated by entities (i.e. Angels or the spirits of the people you're supposed to help) or it is something a being generates within itself, or is it something that's just kind of hardwired into reality?