[Fifth World] Building an adversity economy from the map

[jefgodesky]

My most recent stab at the Power 19 for this project.

To summarize the relevant bits as succinctly as possible, the game's fiction deals with tribes of feral humans living four hundred years after the collapse of civilization. Not the rotting, horrible, post-apocalyptic genre; rather, this aims to provide more of a deep ecology/ecopsychology/bioregional animist answer to Star Trek's humanism. Thematically, the game focuses on world-as-process rather than world-as-object, defined in terms of relationships rather than innate characteristics, and most particularly, the relationship of people to place.

The game has no set GM; instead, the player who plays the NPC's changes according to where you set the scene, and who has the strongest relationship to that place. Scenes go until an "encounter" takes place; the encounter uses stake setting with a Prisoner's Dilemma mechanic. You choose to Open or Close; if you both open, you both get your stakes; if you both close, neither of you get your stakes; if one opens and the other closes, the one who closes gets his stakes, and the one who opens doesn't.

I've made some major changes since running some playtests at Dreamation. Most notably, the whole game now happens on one map. It serves as the setting map, a theme map, and a relationship map (small "r", no real relation to the specific mechanic in Sorcerer) all at once. You also don't need a character sheet, since everything that defines your character you've already written on the map.

I'd like to make the flow of resources through the map an important part of play. When building up the region and your characters, you create specific places and invest them with points called Fate. Each place has a theme, and each character belongs to a certain place, so she shares that theme. If another character reacts to your theme appropriately, you can reward them with Will. I'd like Fate to work as a resource for introducing adversity; spent Fate becomes available for players to reward each other as Will. Players will need Will to accomplish things. Spent Will goes back to the map as Fate. So when you pull back at the end of a game, you can see your actions as shifting Fate around the landscape.

Anyway, this feels half-baked at the point of spending Fate to introduce adversity. In theory, this will avoid the need for players to really go after each other, since you have to introduce adversity in order to generate Will. You choose to make things harder for yourself now in order to improve the land, or achieve your goals later. I feel less certain about the real, nitty-gritty of how this should work. How do you scale and quantify adversity? It feels like it could still come down to player hostility; a nice player would get the Fate by introducing some very simple adversity. so if you introduce significant adversity, you just play mean. I guess the real question comes down to, how much bang should you get for your Fate buck? Or, how do I make sure that a hungry grizzly and a mosquito bite don't cost the same?

[Vulpinoid]

Isn't this just a great excuse to develop an evocative and dynamic stake setting mechanism for your game.

You could do this from a story oriented perspective, the bigger the impact the adversity will have on the narrtive, the more it costs to introduce.

Or you could do it from a sheer difficulty perspective, the harder it is to overcome, the more it costs to introduce.

Both are valid options, but one will be better from the way you percieve the game to be now heading.

It also depends on the granularity of your fate currency, do players have only a couple of points to spend to introduce their elements, or do they have dozens of points?

If you're talking low numbers of points, then a single point might introduce an element that could inconvenience the characters, a pair of points might introduce an element capable of harming them, while three points could introduce a potentially lethal element. Costs would adjust up or down a point based on the element/threat's relationship to the map.

I don't know..I'm just throwing ideas out there for the purposes of brainstorming (because I'm really interested in this project).

V

[jefgodesky]

Your suggestion sparked an interesting idea. I had thought about adversity simply in terms of difficulty, but your suggestion points out that you can also look at it in terms of the impact on the story. So, the raging, hungry grizzly bear might seem like a bigger threat, but if you can take care of him in one scene, then how much does that matter to the story? On the other hand, if you spend the next four scenes working out the ramifications of that mosquito bite, maybe it deserves that cost. Reinforcing this in the rules could actually underline something I've learned early and often in wilderness skills settings: the most dangerous obstacles rarely look so menacing. Try telling Lord Carnarvon that mosquito bites don't deserve a high cost, for instance.

I would like a firm way of measuring this, but it occurred to me, I already have one. The number of Fate points you spend on the adversity tells you how many encounters it will take to fully resolve it. So, if you spend three Fate points on a problem, it will take three encounters to fully resolve it. When you have an encounter with that adversity, the Fate point becomes your Will. And since all this takes place in a specific place with a defined theme, it doesn't count as Fate-point-worthy adversity if it doesn't follow from that place's theme.

[pells]

Your suggestion sparked an interesting idea. I had thought about adversity simply in terms of difficulty, but your suggestion points out that you can also look at it in terms of the impact on the story.

I do think too that stakes are a better than difficulty as a measure. For instance, to take your example, you might kill the bear and save a tribe (or even a family of the tribe), but killing the mosquito might prevent the spreading of malarya.

That said, having read your power 19 (and I do think you've got a nice game there), and about stakes, have you thougth of measuring the impact outside a given region ?
For instance, preventing the malarya might have an impact on the surrounding world. I would think of something along the lines of the mechanic of pandemic : stakes are local, but reaching a certain point, there are "outburst" on the surrounding cities.

So, for a given stake, if you reach a certain "level" of fate, there would be some "spreading" of fate around the nearby regions. This might be very interesting for the players and a good motivation to increase the stakes.

[JoyWriter]

You have no idea how exciting this is to me! I love the idea of hunting story; there's this constructivist problem solving system mixed in there that echoes a lot of the stuff the "systems thinking" people have been working on for the last 30 years; problem solving begins with imbalance, waste and human suffering, but without any causal structure, and part of problem solving is to resolve these threads into a target you can hit, a pattern you can change to relieve the imbalance.

So how do you mix that with hunting? There is an African hunting method where you get into the mind of the thing you are hunting, so better to follow it, but I'll just leave that hanging for a moment; I'm not sure how you empathise with famine or habitat loss. So what's another important part of hunting? Physical location. Now we'll have to be careful here to avoid over-localising; the point you would be seeking out might not be the origin or seed of the problem, in some retributive fashion, as if punishing a logger brings back the forest. Instead it would be more like looking for the place where the solution is to be found, if the damage is sustained by a single source, then removing it would solve the problem, but usually such changes force a shift in the equilibria, in the static patterns of the world, so you would have to find the area of influence that allows you to push things back: Von-Neumann was excited when he heard about butterflies causing hurricanes, because although most of his compatriots hated the way it spoiled their predictions, he wanted to be that butterfly.

So more concretely, what does this say about your mechanic? It seems like there will be two kinds of adversity; standard low level adversity from being a human in a forest, and the adversity caused by imbalance, which I suppose in your would be something like thematic conflict. Now I said two types, and you could play it that way, but I can't help noticing that the first and second could be combined: Why is a mosquito dangerous? Because you do not have immunity to the virus it carries, or is there an animistic explanation that covers the same phenomena? Immunity is a function of familiarity, and so lack of immunity could be a function of foreign-ness. The cure for such a disease could be based on introduction, or rather apology for insult, on the part of a local party, who knows how this part of the forest works. Now the insult could have been that new guests should announce themselves with a smoking branch (the smoke drives off the mosquitoes) but the compensation for the insult is to eat a peculiar mix of the ground and plants (an anti-viral medicine, or magic, depending on how effective it is).
Why does someone get attacked by a bear? Bears will sometimes run if you are scary enough, so bears could be tests of courage and magnanimous victory, because if you corner the bear he will attack you anyway.

So these animal threats can be expressions of the themes of an area, courage and performance-aggression or politeness and ritual consideration.

[jefgodesky]

Pells, thanks for your reply, and your interest in the game. The setting puts a heavy emphasis on bioregionalism, and relocalization. Historically, epidemics arose with concentrated cities to spread through, domestication for zoonotic pathogens to come from, and long-distance trade lines to travel along. In other words, epidemic disease follows from agricultural life, and has a hard time getting off without it, so the Fifth World deals with a post-epidemic world. I know, you meant that as a metaphor, but I think that extension says something about the model as a whole. This game deals with a relocalized world. Things don't spread around like that a lot, whether diseases, stories, or other influences. Not to say that nothing travels at all (after all, pre-Columbian North America had criss-crossing, vibrant trade routes from one end of the continent to the other, but few epidemics that travelled along them), but that it has ceased to play an important part in life. The salient factors all live in your backyard. Building mechanics for spreading from one region to another seems contrary to that. Also, I rely on that relocalization as a natural compartmentalization that allows for a massively-multiplayer tabletop story game. A wiki at thefifthworld.com provides the setting canon and game rules, all open source, so you can write up what happened at your table, and it becomes canonical back story. Individual groups playing at their own tables about their own regions gives the game the compartmentalization needed for that to happen without everyone stepping on each other's toes. I can't imagine a similar Forgotten Realms wiki--Waterdeep would get leveled once a week! How could anyone keep up with it all?

JoyWriter, thanks for your reply and all of your enthusiasm. I'd say that right now, figuring out how to empathize with a famine or habitat loss just like prey plays an important part in the game. I really like what you said about immunity and imbalance, or as I would put it, relationship. I'd say that the game deals with that on the level of the whole game, so I wouldn't want to put it in the basic mechanics, too. That seems like, as Stephen Colbert recently put it, "building a stadium on a foundation of steel, concrete, and another stadium."

[JoyWriter]

I think I see what you mean, so in other words, that stuff I did then with all the mosquitos and bears, that's the kind of stuff you would be creating in play?
If so that could relate well with the wiki, as the animistic explanation would build up bit by bit, and people coming in say a year into the game could have all this mythology to tap into as inspiration, in addition to all the real stuff.

In that world then, presumably opposition would be only the start of story telling, where you'd try to use the themes in an area to explain what the problem was, hopefully structured in such a way that they would create a perspective like the one I suggested, producing appropriate solutions.

I'm thinking you might have a system where you can make partial solutions, as in fight the bear, or more fundimental solutions, where you set up a practice that protects the bears interests while keeping them away from you. Fitting that into the hunting metaphor would possibly lead to the problem getting slowly narrowed down until you get to a certain place, where the problem "lives", making the narrative elements of that location the core of the solution and guiding narration. What d'you think?

Also I know a guy who's into soft-system methodology and aboriginal culture, I get the impression your drawing primarily on American Indian culture, so seeing if we can combine the two would be pretty cool!

[jefgodesky]

To compare to D&D, I'd think of my problem on the level of, "How would you budget out a balanced encounter?" Your suggestion sounds to me more like, "What if you had a game where you kill monsters, take their stuff, and get stronger?" You've summed up what I'd like the whole game experience to achieve, but now I need to back up and figure out the smaller steps that get us from here to there.

And yes, I think it all should make for a natural fit with a wiki-based, open-source setting, just like you noticed.

I like your idea of focusing in on the problem. Do you have any idea about how that might work in practice? What kinds of mechanics would "trick" a group with no such necessary ideas about the world, a group that might not think anything past "big, hungry grizzly bear, RAWR!" to come to that kind of conclusion all on their own?

I want to make a very bioregional game with this. I've started with my own bioregion, of course. Most native traditions claim that they come from participating with the land, and cultural materialists would certainly agree to some extent. The game deals with people who have, of necessity, become native. From a native perspective, they found very similar traditions in the same land; from a cultural materialist perspective, solving the same problems in the same place with the same materials will give you some very similar outcomes. I don't want to make a game of cultural appropriation or white people playing Indian--I have quite a page for that topic to go into the wiki, once I get this far enough along to start filling in the wiki--but by the same token, I do think you'll have some resemblance. Images might do this more justice than words, and I took a lot of my initial inspiration from Michael Green's Afterculture.

Anyway, yes, you'll notice some Native American influence in the land I've started with, because I started with Native American land. I really, really want to see some inspired Australians come up with a land for their bioregion, that gets just as much inspiration from aboriginal Australians. And I want to see visions of a rewilded southern France that draws from the people who painted Lasceaux. I want the game and the setting to provide a framework for people to dream of what a rewilded, feral future for their own bioregion would look like, and a way to share those ideas so they can reinforce and inspire each other.

[Vulpinoid]

I really, really want to see some inspired Australians come up with a land for their bioregion, that gets just as much inspiration from aboriginal Australians.

Pencil me in for that once you're ready for such things.

V

[JoyWriter]

Glad to know I now have the "fruitful void" in the right place! The problem you have mechanically seems equivalent to creating a mystery game where the mystery's resolution is created by the players. In other words, given an undefined problem drawn from a set of factors, the objective is to create a solution that acts as if it is "uncovering" previously undiscovered links, when in actual fact the solution is being created. The watchword for this kind of problem for me is consistency. Something that fits all the facts. The question of design then is to create a set of facts that interact in such a way that they can be made into a pattern, and preferably in chunks, so players can learn to integrate larger and larger pieces of info.

Now that's abstract, so I'll try to pull it in a bit. Working with what you have so far, you have a system where players gain resources by acting "appropriately" given another players concept. This is an expression of consistency! One way you could produce consistency is by encouraging players to fit more and more aspects into their actions, and those they do not fit require will to defeat. In other words harmony provides the power to deal with disharmony.

Given such a mechanic, how do you cause escalation from player <-> player to player <-> village and beyond? Well one way to do it is to make it so that far away areas that do not match you slowly effect those that do, spreading their conflict into your own locality, so you have to expand your metaphor and fit in these broader needs in your action. Mechanically this could be done by creating a border of harmony and measuring the strength of agreement or disagreement with those places and people's on the other side, with the potential of frictions if disagreement is common.

But this "thematic equilibrium" creates a slightly different game to the one you suggest, it is a static one where we fit our nature to the world's. In a nutshell its a stoic or daoist one. But that's not surprising as although as you wisely suggest, advancement is only a subset of the important of dealing with change, in your power 19 answers you reframe the question but then do not answer it! So how do you plan to deal with change? Or is that not yet defined?

In a world where change is the focus, then the attitude is a different one, but related: Instead of creating an expanding sphere of harmony, we are interested in finding and removing the sources of disharmony that exist in the world. So instead fitting into a pattern, the pattern we are trying to find is "the problem", which although it deals in harmony because the form of the problem implicitly includes it's solution, would be different as it includes more active adjustment of the environment.

Now I'm all for that, animist cultures shaped the world to themselves as they shaped themselves to it, but I can't go much further on producing that mechanism until I know more about how you are thinking about dealing with change. As a vague idea though, chaos theory or no, problems here do not appear everywhere, and have to get there via something. So there should always be a trail from where you meet opposition to where the real problem is. Whether the players track the problem from the woods back to the village or from the village to the woods could be their choice, or be due to the effects of conflicts.

[Brimshack]

I've always thought Navajo Space-Time imagery would make an interesting game schema. You get this massive meta-symbol that equates colors with directions of the compass, with mountains in the SW, with times of day, with stages of life, with posts in the hogan, with moments (and places) in the creation narrative, with moments in the songs sung in ceremony. ...literally, if you know the color terms only, you can follow a little of the story and at least tell where the story is taking place at any given point in a ceremony and, ...well, frankly, how long you have till you can go to the bathroom. "...thank the holy people! They made it to the North Mountain."

One potential schema for laying out a mapping story might be the recreation of the local space by following a set pattern using the cardinal directions (exactly what is done in Navajo Healing ceremonies). If the pattern were presaged by exposure to a ceremony or exposure to other aspects of symbolism (the hint given to players) and then the stakes were in some sense calibrated to following the pattern in the story, you could have an interesting campaign schema. First, you must do something here, then you must do something there. ...if you do it willy-nilly, or worse, moving the other way around, you generate witchcraft and make things in the local worse.

BTW: A fantastic window on native mapping can be found in the negotiations to the Navajo Treaty of 1868. Barboncito, the Navajo spokesman is very clear on the reasons they do not prosper at Bosque Redondo. It isn't alkalai in the soil, the army worm infestation, or anything like that. It is that the place itself DOES NOT WANT Navajos living there. The land has utterly rejected them.

Just an immediate thought.

[jefgodesky]

So, two days ago, I decided to scrap everything and start over. The playtests resulted in some really un-fun, metagamey play, and I think the problem lies pretty deep in how I've approached the design thus far. JoyWriter and Brimshack, your suggestions here also rattled around in my brain when coming to that decision.

But that's not surprising as although as you wisely suggest, advancement is only a subset of the important of dealing with change, in your power 19 answers you reframe the question but then do not answer it! So how do you plan to deal with change? Or is that not yet defined?

Hmm, I thought I had answered that. Advancement indicates change in one direction, and with a value judgment attached to that direction (this direction "is good"; the other direction "is bad"). I'd like this game to take a keen interest in how people change, regardless of what direction you change in, and without trying to attach judgments to one direction or another. In the game I just scrapped, you built the map by changing, by traveling across it. Interacting with the world changes the world. At the end of the game, the map has changed. From a certain detached perspective, the whole game just detailed out how you changed and how you changing changed the region.

But, those didn't work out. I still like that idea, but I don't think the rules executed it very well.

I don't know if I fully understood everything you had to say in that last post, but I liked a lot of what I read. Looking for consistency, harmony or disharmony, puts it in very good terms. It focuses the game on dreaming about the future. It even dovetails nicely with the wiki setup, to boot. But I don't know if I really understand how that would work as a game. If you have the time, energy and inclination to expand on that, I'd very much appreciate it. I can certainly understand if you don't--it's taken me all these days just to write you back, after all! And if not, you've certainly planted an interesting seed just by putting it in those terms.

I've always thought Navajo Space-Time imagery would make an interesting game schema.

Some of the earlier versions experimented with this. The version I playtested at Dreamation used a Navajo-inspired Medicine Wheel for the character sheet. I will definitely keep it in mind for the next round--I don't know how it all fits together yet, but it very well might.

[JoyWriter]

Ok, starting with your open/closed idea, I read it streight after reading "mist robed gate" and pondering how to make respecting other players concepts a big part of the game. In my sleepy brain they merged together with your power 19 description, so I got the idea that your conflict mechanic was meant to work something like this:

Stake will to interact with another character or the land, they respond, if you like their response, they get that much will, if they like yours, you get that much will, otherwise the one who isn't in harmony with the other's themes looses will. Either way, the change corresponding to action described (which is sort of bought with the will put in) happens. There could also possibly be a way to spend will to restrict effects you don't like, but my idea was that the amount of will staked would limit the possible consequences anyway, as a sort of upper limit of severity.

So players are open and closed depending on how they react to each other; a player could try to play their character to another's theme even as he attacks them, because they can use that will later to recover from the negative effects and continue affecting stuff.

And when more characters get involved, in that a characters action affects them and they say so, then they react and also add or subtract will depending on they take his action, and he does the same to them.

So that's a vague idea of how it works, so at the start will drains like mad as players try to get a handle on how to play in concert with the surrounding people and land, or drains slower as they tread softly and don't spend much will, and then as they start to get more harmonious they can start to more ambitious actions, being careful to avoid affecting new areas in a negative way. But as you can see, this mechanic is not about travel, it's about people rooted in place slowly expanding their influence and making it stronger by making it more subtle.

So that's out, I want to hunt story!

Perhaps you could explain your travel/change mechanic, 'cos I'm not getting it from the description you give? Are you saying that the map starts out barely filled in and you expand it over time, with the structure holding the lessons your characters learn? Or you rewrite it as the characters move through it? Part of the reason I find your game concept interesting is that it doesn't deal with the externalised aborigine, by definition "at one" with his surroundings, but that guy who is actually trying to be at one with this crazy changing world. And that effort, that change, was something I find really cool. A guy hunting down the source of a disease or a migration, (or more broadly signs of pain in someone connected to him, be they animal, man or river) and putting things right. It feels to me a little like that guy would be creating his own character for the whole of the journey, 'cos his world just went a little askew, and he needs to change with it.

[jefgodesky]

In the rules I had worked with until recently, the basic resolution mechanic used something like the Prisoner's Dilemma. You declare stakes, and then make a secret choice to Open or Close. If you Open, you open yourself to the other person at the cost of vulnerability; if you Close, you guard yourself, at the cost of missing the encounter with the other person. So if you both Open, you both get your stakes, and you generally build your relationship. If you both Close, basically, no encounter takes place, since you both spend so much time protecting yourself. Neither of you get your stakes. If one person Opens and the other person Closes, the person who Closes takes advantage of the other person's vulnerability, and basically gets in a sucker punch. The person who Opens loses her stakes; the person who Closes gets her stakes.

Will gave you a resource to bribe the other person to open. To make it something you want, I used it to power special abilities, and to do things like move the scene. So, you use Fate from a place to create Trouble; you turn Trouble into Will by encountering it and resolving it; and then you use Will by depositing it in the place as new Fate to move on to the next place. So throughout the game, you change the paths connecting places. If you Close on an Open path, it shifts to Uncertain, and then to Closed. On the other hand, if you Open, knowing the other person has Closed, making yourself vulnerable and taking that hit, you can open up previously closed paths by your trust-building sacrifice. Also, the Fate in each place becomes Trouble, and gets redistributed to different places as you move around the map. So the map changes throughout play.

But I found some fundamental problems with these mechanics, as I've discussed elsewhere. I like the theory here about how the map changes, but frankly, I never saw as much of that in playtesting as I would have wanted.

[jefgodesky]

Sorry, I guess I should've previewed that. That link should go here: http://thefifthworldsg.blogspot.com/2009/05/story-beyond-conflict.html