[The Waste] A first look at my resolution system

[Charlie Gilb]

Hello,

I am a rather neophyte game designer, and am working on a game with the working title "The Waste".

The Waste is a post-apocalyptic, party-based (though solo play is possible) horror/survival RPG. PCs would encounter mutant raiders, strange monsters, and crazed wastelanders as they each strive to maintain their Hope and Humanity.

The setting is still very much in-development, and nothing is really set in stone yet. Thematically, my main influences are Fallout (the video game) + Rustbelt + Don't Rest Your Head, with some of the mechanics more informed by FATEs Aspects, and John Harper's Lady Blackbird (I use a modified Trait mechanic, but we'll get to that some other time).

I wanted to post the skeleton of my resolution system here to see if I can gain some insights as to how it might shake out, primarily, the interactions between Hope, Humanity, Pain and Stress.

Here's a few terms, and roughly what they mean:

Hope- this is represented by a number, starting at 10. There should also be a sentence, which is essentially a character goal. The PCs' Hope is the reason that they continue to press onward and travel the Waste. Without Hope, man becomes a Slave; he can fight the Waste no longer.

Humanity- this is also represented by a number, probably a range between 1 and 20. Without Humanity, man becomes a Monster.

Stress- this is the GM's dice pool that he rolls against the PC's whenever there is a conflict. The number of dice is chosen based on both the difficulty, and relative importance of the task being undertaken.

Pain- this is a dice pool that the PC rolls against himself. Pain dice are earned and kept when a PC fails a conflict roll, and elects to 'Take the Pain'. You'll see how this works below.

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CONFLICT RESOLUTION:

1. Declare Intent - the Player announces a task for his character, like "I want to kill those 3 bandits", or "I want to hotwire this old Buick". The GM will then announce his own Intent for the scene, like "The bandits want to capture you", or "I want the Buick to backfire, and blow its engine".

2. Gather dice - the Player gathers a dice pool based on the Lifepaths and Aspects on his character sheet. This pool will be between 1 and 10 dice. The GM will gather an amount of stress dice determined by the relative difficulty, also between 1 (very easy, or not relatively important) and 10 (very difficult of pivotal to achieve the character's Hope)

3. Dice are rolled and compared. The highest die on each side are compared to one another, with person who has the higher roll succeeding.

4. If there is a tie, compare to the next highest die. If one person runs out of dice to compare, the person with dice remaining wins the conflict.

5. The degree of success is the difference between the two dice that are compared to one another. If one person runs out of dice to compare (due to ties), then they effectively have rolled a 0.

6. If the player succeeds on the roll, their Intent happens. If the GM wins the roll, then the GM's Intent happens, unless the player decides to Take the Pain. The player can elect to take an amount of Pain dice equal to the degree of failure on the conflict roll. If he does this, his original Intent for the conflict succeeds (instead of the GM), but with some type of complication with severity equal to the amount of Pain dice he just took.

Now, what are Pain dice used for?

In future conflicts, the GM will roll Stress dice against the player as normal. The player will roll two separate pools: one from his Aspects and Lifepaths (as above), and a set of different color dice for Pain. Pain will be counted with the GM's Stress in order to determine who succeeds on their Intent.

When Pain is taken by a player, he writes down how it comes about. Here are a few examples, not all of which occured in physical combats:

-Took a shotgun blast to the hand (2)
-Bitten in the hand by a giant rat (1)
-Thought I saw my brother's ghost (3)
-Angry about being conned by a card shark (2)

Pain sticks around, until the player alleviates it in the game. Pain can be alleviated in some cases by doing things within the fiction, like finding healing (and making a roll against the those Pain dice) or tracking down the card shark that duped you. Things like that.

OR players can elect to spend Hope, in order to alleviate Pain on a 1-for-1 basis.

A PC can re-gain Hope points by pursuing whatever it is the listed in their Hope description. Hope awards should be sporadic and only given for successfully progressing their character's story. Hope should also be given for a PC helping another PC with their Hope. I am still working on more specifics here.

If Hope ever goes down to 0, the PC kills himself at the first appropriate opportunity. The player should have narrative authority over this.

------------

Humanity- At any time, Humanity can be sacrificed to aid in any conflict roll, even increasing the PC's dice pool above 10. Humanity is sacrificed on a 1 point for 1 die basis. However, this sacrifice should symbolize the character giving in to more base, primal instincts. If there is an especially brutal, malicious, or violent solution to the conflict, then the player must take it, to a degree based on the amount of Humanity he is sacrificing.

Another way to lose Humanity- Whenever a time arises when a character's Pain exceeds his Hope, make an opposed Pain vs Hope roll. If Pain wins, the difference is subtracted from Humanity. If Hope wins, nothing happens. If Hope is 0, then the roll is unopposed.

If Humanity reaches 0, the PC becomes a Monster, and is unplayable.

PC can regain Humanity by showing Compassion for others, saving lives, and generally going out of their way to improve the lives of others in the Wastes.

===================

All right, time for my thoughts and questions.

The intent behind this system is to facilitate the telling of very tragic, grim tales of survival and the moral choices involved. One thing of note is that there is no possible way for the GM to directly kill the PC without the player's go ahead.

The player can:
1. elect to spend all of his Hope to commit suicide,
2. keep going until all Humanity is lost and the PC becomes a Monster,
3. fail a roll when the GM's Intent is to kill the character and elect not to Take the Pain

Not exactly cheerful ends, but I personally like the idea of giving the player some level of control over the PC's demise, should it happen. I would like to hear people's thoughts about these options, and anyway to make them perhaps a bit more interesting.

Another thing that I will really have to get through playtesting is how many opportunities there should be to regain Hope and Humanity in order to allow for an engaging, scary, and dangerous game that isn't a hopeless downward spiral for the PC's (unless that is the group's goal).

Ideally, stories should involve very strong moral choices where the PC's Hope will be at odds with their Humanity. I might even specify that Hope should be something that might even be a little selfish to ensure that this type of conflict occurs.

Oh, and 'Monster' is still ill-defined, but I kinda like it that way.

Questions:

Is the above interesting to you?

Are there any holes or things I seem to be overlooking?

Is the currency between Stress, Pain, Hope, and Humanity clear?

Most importantly: Are there other questions I should really be asking here?

(this was cross-posted at Story Games, but obviously, this is probably the better forum for it)

[MacLeod]

I think this sounds pretty interesting. Partly because I'm always interested in trying out a Post-Apocalyptic game and partly because I really like the Fatigue/Madness mechanics of DRYH.
I'm interested in how the Life Path/Aspects portion of the game works. =)

[Charlie Gilb]

MacLeod- Thanks for the reply!

I will explain the Lifepath/Aspect mechanic in brief here, if you think it would be helpful. Any and all critiques are welcome, but right now I am primarily interested in discussing the mechanics with Stress, Pain, Hope, and Humanity, as this is the part of the system that I really want to stick out.

Basically, when you create a character in the Waste, you get to assign him 1-3 lifepaths that you create. You can name the lifepaths anything you like, as long as everyone at the table agrees that the names are within the spirit of your particular game. Example lifepath names might be "Wastelander", "Highwayman", "Crazy Old Hermit", "Witch", "Giant Scorpion Hunter", "Mutant Gladiator" or "Caravan Master".

From there, each player will get 12 Aspects to assign between their 1-3 lifepaths. Aspects can be pretty much anything that might relate to the time the character spent in that lifepath. They include skills, traits, organizations, quotes, or things that may have happened to the character.

Example of a character with 2 Lifepaths and 12 Aspects

Magnus

Lifepath 1: Caravan Slave
- Broken
- Good with my hands
- "I once marched across the Wastes for weeks without water."
- Blackton Coal Mine
- Strong back
- Inconspicuous

Lifepath 2: Bounty Hunter
- Crack shot
- Thousand yard stare
- Ties knots better than any boyscout
- Indebted to the Blackton Family
- Fearless
- Expert Tracker


When Magnus is in a conflict, he gathers his dice pool by referencing his Lifepaths and Aspects. His dice pool is assembled as follows:

1. He starts with one six-sided die.

2. If the time spent in one of his lifepaths could somehow be related to the task he is undertaking, he gets an additional die. For example, if Magnus has to travel across some uncharted territory, the player might say that when Magnus was a bounty hunter, he had to track a fugitive across this very same stretch, and he remembers a few things.

3. Next, the player looks under the lifepath he chose to gain the additional die for to see if any of the aspects listed relate to his current task. For each aspect, he gains another die. In the example above, Expert Tracker would grant me one additional die, and I might be able to make the case for a few of the others. If he was undertaking a mission for the Blackton Family, or going to meet them, and additional die would be granted.

Does that make sense?

[Abkajud]

Awesome!
This looks really great, Charlie!
I was a little worried when you said Humanity would be a stat... I'm still a little shell-shocked from the faux-storytelling of World of Darkness games! But what you have here is based on active player choices, rather than a tut-tutting assessment by the GM every time your character "messes up".
Have you read lumpley's Roleplaying: Hardcore essay at his website? That bit about player death needing to mean something reminded me of that exactly, and that's what made it clear to me that I should give control of player death to the players for my own game design.
MacLeod, I too am really excited about this being a post-apocalyptic game... particularly one that's not incredibly over-detailed or crunchy. I know a few Forgies have come up with Story Now material for this genre, but nothing in conventional gaming has gone this way with the whole Mad Max angle yet. Good times!
One thing that's got me wondering - should the GM try harder to assign the "correct" difficulty to conflicts, or should he look over the PC's sheet and see which traits could be relevant first?
For example: Magnus is hired to scope out some information about a machinist in one of the Blackton family factories, someone suspected of organizing the workers(gasp!). If you choose your Caravan Slave lifepath to roll, then you could take "Good with my hands", "Strong back", and "Inconspicuous" to successfully pass as a worker in the factory, getting 5 dice to roll.
I'm wondering if the GM's consideration would/should be to decide how difficult this conflict is to beat ("Do I find some dirt on this guy?"), or if the GM has to/should just pick a number related to how many dice you have going for you, and thus how tough the situation "should" be, based on how challenging he wants to make it.
Vague, I know, but it's something that's gotten me stumped with my own game design - when skilling up NPCs, it's one part "What would they know how to do?" and one part "Is this/should this be a challenge?" I guess my main question is, do you have ideas on how to guide the GM with setting Stress pools?

[Charlie Gilb]

Thanks for the reply Abkajud!

I am glad you are digging my take on the Humanity mechanic, as well as the post-apocalyptic feel.

Let me see if I can address a few of your questions, and maybe we can bounce some ideas back and forth.

(I can't get my quote thingie to work, so your questions are in italics)

Have you read lumpley's Roleplaying: Hardcore essay at his website?

No, I have not. But now I will be checking it out

One thing that's got me wondering - should the GM try harder to assign the "correct" difficulty to conflicts, or should he look over the PC's sheet and see which traits could be relevant first?

*SNIP*

I'm wondering if the GM's consideration would/should be to decide how difficult this conflict is to beat ("Do I find some dirt on this guy?"), or if the GM has to/should just pick a number related to how many dice you have going for you, and thus how tough the situation "should" be, based on how challenging he wants to make it.

I would like to minimize the amount of worry about setting the "correct" difficulty for GMs, and I think it shouldn't be necessary to look at the PC's sheet. Ultimately, the player decides which aspects are relevant, and each aspect that he proposes is subject to veto by anyone at the table, though a certain level of discussion is permissible.

Also, maybe the Stress pool doesn't need to be tied that closely to how difficult something is, and instead be based on the amount of tension that the GM wants to create for that scene. To me, this seems far more interesting than judging how many dice some enemy should roll, or basing the number of Stress dice on the number of dice the player is rolling.

Personally, I am not all that interested in "realism"; I want the Stress dice to be doing just that-- creating Stress appropriate to the dangers presented in the fiction!

The following example might be helpful:

Let's say my character wants to quickly hotwire an old motorcycle. For an experienced mechanic, this should be fairly easy, BUT let's take a look at the context he is trying to do it in. See the following two scenarios:

1. With a laugh, the Dust Devils (a wasteland gang) speed off into the distance with the rest of Magnus's food supply, leaving him stranded in the sleepy town of Ironspike. With no money or goods to barter, Magnus wants to hotwire a motorcycle to chase them; he can't let them get away! Regardless of Magnus's pool, I assign a Stress pool of 3, which (if my estimation is correct) should be characterized as a 'moderately tense situation'. My decision to choose this number is informed by the fact that although this might be important to Magnus, it does not directly related to his Hope, and if he fails, he will have other options to get supplies.

2. The Dust Devils speed off in the distance, with Magnus's long-lost daughter tied up on a sled behind them. It had been so long since he had seen her, and within moments she had been taken from him again! Magnus's Hope is "I will do everything I can to be reunited with my sister". Magnus finds a motorcycle to hotwire, in order to give chase! Here, the actual task is the same, but because this situation should be more tense and exciting, I am going to assign a Stress pool of 7. This is something that Magnus's player has said (via his Hope) is important to them, and should naturally be a tense part of the story. If he fails, Magnus's player is far more likely to take the Pain and press on..... and that is what this game is about.

What do you think of that? That was off the cuff, but I think it serves to illustrate my general point.

Vague, I know, but it's something that's gotten me stumped with my own game design - when skilling up NPCs, it's one part "What would they know how to do?" and one part "Is this/should this be a challenge?" I guess my main question is, do you have ideas on how to guide the GM with setting Stress pools?

My solution: don't bother 'skilling up' NPCs. Ever. It doesn't matter what they can or can't do (to me anyway) in an objective sense. If I am rolling 5 dice from Stress to make a tense scene, and 5 dice that I have just decided represents a bandit's shotgun skill, mechanically I am doing the same thing. In the former case, I am making a decision based on what I think will make the scene more exciting. In the latter case, I am basing my decision on some obscure notion of 'realism' (what a bandit's skill level should be). For my purposes, I prefer the former.

Is all of the above clear? I know I can get a bit longwinded and scatter-brained. Again, thanks for taking the time to read this.

[Charlie Gilb]

*One quick clarification on assigning Stress dice. I want to make it clear that I don't think GMs should just pull numbers out of their ass to make the Stress Pool. Once I begin really playtesting this thing, I will be coming up with a set of guidelines to help decide how many Stress dice should be rolled.

[Abkajud]

Cool, I like it!
I'm interested in seeing those guidelines for assigning Stress; that'll quiet the bothersome little voice in my head, I think.
I wish I had more to say as a reply, other than "Sounds good!"

[Abkajud]

Okay, how about this: any ideas yet for player-to-player conflict?
Secondly, any ideas on the actual dice-rolling process to resolve conflict?

[Charlie Gilb]

Hey, Abkajud.

I am still fiddling with the Stress assigning guidelines; hopefully, I will have a better idea about what they should be after I playtest a bit this weekend.

To answer your other questions:

Okay, how about this: any ideas yet for player-to-player conflict?

Not yet. I imagine it will be some kind of mechanic where they each bid to take more and more Pain until someone gives.

Secondly, any ideas on the actual dice-rolling process to resolve conflict?

I might be misunderstanding you here, but that is detailed in my first post, under conflict resolution.

I have another concern that I have been mulling over about some of the mechanics. Do you think explicitly having Hope and Humanity as stats might cheapen their narrative impact? More importantly, do you think the presence of these two stats can facilitate play based around these themes without players just "playing towards" those stats because they have to?

[Abkajud]

More importantly, do you think the presence of these two stats can facilitate play based around these themes without players just "playing towards" those stats because they have to?

The whole point of having stats like these, in most game designs, I think, is to give structure to players who are trying to explore these themes in play. Even if someone does just try to "game" the system, it's up to the group, and especially the GM, to decide in some fashion if they're being "genuine" about things. In my opinion, build your game for people who would at least be somewhat interested in thematic play to begin with; assume that people who would want to play the game right are going to be the ones who play it.
I had a looong conversation with an old gaming buddy of mine yesterday about Honor in Mask of the Emperor and how it differs from the Honor mechanics in L5R. Suffice it to say, I had to say repeatedly that a "gotta win!" attitude would be inappropriate in a game of Mask, if it trumped the desire to explore themes of honor, sacrifice, etc.
At the same time, somebody who's "gaming" the system because they know no different could be a great person to have in your game; showing them a new way to RP would be worth the frustration of resolving disparate Creative Agenda stuff, I should think!

[Omar_Ramirez]

Hi there... this discussion is almost a month old... but I just found your system way too interesting not to reply.

I love the conflict resolution mecanics, and it seems any issue regarding the "difficulty / importance" level of a conflict will be adressed in play testing, that's great.

I am worried, though, and since I get it this is the thing you really wanted feedback on, that humanity seems not much a like a relevant trait. All the others seem to interact white elegantly. Humanity, though, much as I try to see it, seems not to be relevant enough yet.

I probably say this because I don't see it getting into conflicts in any way. Maybe some sort of "Humanity stake" put into the conflict resolution system would help?

My two cents, looking forward to the final product... or playtesting, I'd be really glad to test this baby!

[dindenver]

Charlie,
  This is a cool mechanic. I want to point out that you ave the "equivalent" of character death in this game. And it is totally out of the players control.
  If Pain gets too high (a factor tat is completely out of the player's control), it involuntarily lowers Humanity. And once Humanity gets too low, the player loses their character. Its not character death, per se. But if the player no longer controls the character and they have to make a new character, that's the same as dying.

[Charlie Gilb]

dindenver- Thanks for the response! I suppose I should mention that I am stripping most of the above and starting back at square one. I tried a few test runs with the mechanics, and I didn't like how they worked out. However, regarding the 'equivalent' or character death being out of the player's control, I have to disagree. Players decide when they take Pain. If a player never takes Pain, then he isn't forced into the death spiral. Regardless, I am re-working the mechanics anyway, so I am not sure how practical it would be to debate the issue. However, if you have additional insights, or see something there worth addressing, I would love to hear it.

Omar- Glad you like it! I agree with your thoughts on Humanity, and I have decided to get rid of it as a stat. I'll post what else I come up with here, soon.

[dindenver]

Charlie,
  OK, no need to debate. How about a suggestion. Maybe instead of humanity being their hit points. Use Humanity as a modifier.
  This is what I am doing with Purity/Corruption in SteamPunk Crescendo. What happens is, your Spiritual Purity increases when you take a penalty to do something Pure and decreases when you take a bonus to do something Pure. The reverse is true too.
  So, Purity is measured from +5 to -5. To increase purity, you take a penalty equal to its current rating while doing something purehearted. Or you can elect to take a bonus and sacrifice a point of Purity. So, teh idea is, you hae to sacrifice something to improve and trhe sacrifice gets bigger the more you benefit from it.
  Maybe you can use something like that in the new version of your game.

  Anyways, I like the basic structure of your original design. I just misunderstood how characters got Pain. I would use that as a base and tweak it. Can I ask, what went wrong? Maybe you just need to tweak the scale of the numbers or something simple like that...