The West Wind: Help with Hope (rules rework)

[Jasper]

Hi everyone, I've been mulling over the many suggestions I've recieved here, in Actual Play, from friends, and over at RPG.net.  Thanks to one friend's suggestions in particular, I've gotten a clearer sense of what I want to do with the game, and what the rules need to accomplish.  As is, they're too open-ended, and don't give enough guidance mechanically or really thematically.  So, with all that now clear to me, I've done a major rework of it.  I want to solicit opinions on the changes in general, and in particular on two rules that I need to address but have several options (at least) to choose from.

First change, attributes will no longer be open-ended, or at least there will be a standard list to work with.  With a subject as narrow as Tolkien-style epic travel fantasy, there aren't a lot of tropes to consider.  Things such as fighting will be codified so that the breadth of attributes is no longer in question.  If players need attributes not covered, they can still take them of course, and the basics could be reworked in theory for a particular campaign.  But a baseline to establish what's normal, and the theme, seems appropriate.

Secondly, I'll be formalizing a sort of combine Story Arc and character map, where at the beginning of play the GM and players will be able to record the major goal of their party, as well as inter-relationships, allies, and some initial difficulties that will get in the way of that goal.  As the game goes on, this can be added on to (more on this in a sec').

Narrative Points: these babies are now much more quantified, and there is incentive to use then.  You gain NPs by introducting conflict and complications into the story.  Firstly, this can occur at the level of the story Arc, and costs quite a few points: introducing new villains, the fact that a villain has an army, whatever.  Major stuff that will have to be dealt with.  Secondly, a player can narrate in difficulties within a scene -- leading to a conflict -- or a conflict itself -- leading to penalties in the rolls.    What are NPs used for?  Just the reverse: introducing positive, helpful elements, including calling on allies (already defined in the Arc map), making up new ones, favorable conditions on the road or in a conflict, etc.      NPs will be in relatively short supply unless the players introduce bad stuff, so they should be inclined to.  Anything that is ambigiously neither good nor bad is narrated free of charge.

Conflict Resolution: failing a task resolution roll can result in Disabilities -- semi-temporary penalties to attributes; injury for instance would be one justification -- or a turn for the worse within the Arc, or a loss of Hope.  I'll get to Hope in a second.  Success in a conflict results in positive effects on the story -- effectively this means giving out narration points that have to be used immediately.  This might itself lead to a regaining of Hope (but it takes a major success to do this probably).

Hope is like Weariness in the old rules, and more what I was originally trying to capture.  I think that what it represents should be obvious (especially knowing that this game is heavily LoTR inspired).  I'm not sure quite how to handle it though.  One option is to have it provide extra points (ala Hero Points before).  Another is to make it induce a penalty when low (ala Weariness before).  Either would probably work, but I want it to be more than simply a rating: I want some characters to be inherently Hopeful.  And by that I don't mean that they start with more points, or regenerate them more easily, but rather that they are more hope dependant.  Nearly all the characters in LoTR become hopeless at times and hopeful at others, but some this affects more than others.  Frodo, for instance, doesn't have a whole lot of Attributes, but it's his humanity that gets him through -- the extra dice from Hope?  So Hope does vary during play, but it should also be defined partly by character.

The second rule I'm not sure quite how to handle is Values.  I want to keep basically the same mechanic, whereby you get points of some kind for honoring your Values -- say, doign what your king says, because your his liege, even though it interferes with your quest.  What to give out though?  The simplest choice, and which would work, is just NPs.  It's tidy, but not very interesting, and offers less chance for differentiation between characters as the other options.  The second is to have it raise Hope.  Hope would become a little different then, and also encompass personal strength as well -- but that's fine.  This makes sense to me, since those tow things sort of go together.

Then again, it might also thematically make sense to differentiate between characters who are hopeless but strong (in an inner/heroic sense) and those who are hopeful but relatively weak.  ONe way to do that would be to bring back Hero Points, separately from Hope, but have a  strong linkage between the two.  So honoring Values gives Hero Points, which can be used to give extra dice in conflicts.  Hope would need to somehow limit one's number of Hero Points, or control how they were used.  Maybe HPs could effectively be the varying portion of Hope as originally formulated, and Hope itself the permanant character stat that effects how HPs are used.  I can't think of a good mechanic to accomplish this however.

Thoughts?



PS. "Thoughts?" is becoming my standard tag-line I think.  Maybe I should make it permanent, so that even when I'm not asking a for opinions, it would be rhetorical question and a perhaps even a subtle jab at whether certain people have any or not. ;)

[Tony Irwin]

I'm all for more LotR games! So I've been reading everything you've been writing with a lot of interest Jasper.

First change, attributes will no longer be open-ended, or at least there will be a standard list to work with.  With a subject as narrow as Tolkien-style epic travel fantasy, there aren't a lot of tropes to consider.  Things such as fighting will be codified so that the breadth of attributes is no longer in question.  If players need attributes not covered, they can still take them of course, and the basics could be reworked in theory for a particular campaign.  But a baseline to establish what's normal, and the theme, seems appropriate.

Something I've been wondering about recently (again because im in love with the idea of rpging LotR) is that if a big theme of the game is exploring, experiencing, and encountering the people and places that The Journey takes you through, then maybe the skills should be geared towards this? I can understand how anyone could sit down and think "Ok, let's split it into weapon mastery skills, magical knowledge, and then social skills like leadership and fellowship", but Im beginning to wonder if skills like (say) Archery 4, or Fireball 2, are really going to help the players use their characters to explore the game world.

Here's a few throw away ideas... Physical Skills are only those that will get the PCs to new areas for the Players to explore: including Marching, Riding, Boating. Mental Skills are dedicated to helping PCs comprehend the peoples and places the players want them to meet: including History, Lore, Maps, Heraldry. Social Skills are about encountering new people and getting them to help you on your Journey: Befriend, Inspire. Magic is just a supernatural way of achieving any of the above. That way the PC's skills are actually helping me as a player explore the world and experience The Journey, as opposed to me sitting back thinking "I can't wait till the GM gets us to Mordor so I can get those archery dice rolling".

Anyway its just stuff I've been mulling over. I love the way your game focuses on The Journey and I'm keen to see how different parts of your system will explore that.

Narrative Points: these babies are now much more quantified, and there is incentive to use then.  You gain NPs by introducting conflict and complications into the story.  Firstly, this can occur at the level of the story Arc, and costs quite a few points: introducing new villains, the fact that a villain has an army, whatever.  Major stuff that will have to be dealt with.  Secondly, a player can narrate in difficulties within a scene -- leading to a conflict -- or a conflict itself -- leading to penalties in the rolls.    What are NPs used for?  Just the reverse: introducing positive, helpful elements, including calling on allies (already defined in the Arc map), making up new ones, favorable conditions on the road or in a conflict, etc.      NPs will be in relatively short supply unless the players introduce bad stuff, so they should be inclined to.  Anything that is ambigiously neither good nor bad is narrated free of charge.

Sounds good Jasper, looks like there's real motivation for the players to start narrating things into the story - have you considered the possibility though that using Narrative Points in this way could turn your game very much into a story about good things vs bad things? Obviously that's a big part of Tolkein but perhaps during play the emphasis for players will become "How can I earn NPs with minimum disadvantage to myself (and my buddies) and how can I spend them to maximum advantage?" whereas I think originally with NPs you were aiming for the kind of play where people ask "How can I earn and spend NPs in a way that's interesting to me (and my buddies)". Anyway I'll be interested to see how it playtests.

Hope is like Weariness in the old rules, and more what I was originally trying to capture.  I think that what it represents should be obvious (especially knowing that this game is heavily LoTR inspired).  I'm not sure quite how to handle it though.  One option is to have it provide extra points (ala Hero Points before).  Another is to make it induce a penalty when low (ala Weariness before).  Either would probably work, but I want it to be more than simply a rating: I want some characters to be inherently Hopeful.  And by that I don't mean that they start with more points, or regenerate them more easily, but rather that they are more hope dependant.  Nearly all the characters in LoTR become hopeless at times and hopeful at others, but some this affects more than others.  Frodo, for instance, doesn't have a whole lot of Attributes, but it's his humanity that gets him through -- the extra dice from Hope?  So Hope does vary during play, but it should also be defined partly by character.

Sounds great, I'll be really interested to see where you take this. Sadly Im not really up on the terminology for discussing "metagame" and so on but you may find it helpful to think of where your idea lies in terms of these two options.

Is hope something that directs me & my character? As in do I try to roleplay out my current hope rating so that I can "feel" what its like to be filled with despair as we drag our ponies through the marshes and keep getting minuses to all my rolls, and then when the GM rewards me with a few Hope points it makes all my rolls a little easier and I generally play my character as being more upbeat.

Or is hope something that I'm very much in control of? Can I burn up hope points because Im thinking "It would be really cool if my Boromir character started getting really down just now and started bitchin' about the rest of the party" and then later can I go into a situation to earn hope points because I'm thinking "Ok that was fun but now I want Boromir to be a bit more peppy because we're getting closer to Gondor"

Anyway I look forward to seeing more of your game.

Tony

[Jasper]

Thanks for your shows of interest, Tony.  The game was drifting away from me, as I focused too much on the details of some mechanics, so hopefully this version will indeed be more grounded in The Journey, and thus have a more obviously LoTR feel.

Physical Skills are only those that will get the PCs to new areas for the Players to explore.... Mental Skills are dedicated to helping PCs comprehend the peoples and places the players want them to meet.... Social Skills are about encountering new people and getting them to help you on your Journey....That way the PC's skills are actually helping me as a player explore the world and experience The Journey, as opposed to me sitting back thinking "I can't wait till the GM gets us to Mordor so I can get those archery dice rolling".

Great idea.  Making sure that every attribute has a clear and definite place within the Story, and affects in in a particular way, helps to codify how the story itself will unfold and each character's part in it.  I might be cautious about very hard divisions, since some attributes might be used in multiple circumstances, but each one might at least be given a clear label.  Then, in the part of the rules where I break down the journey into quantifiable parts (expanded from just travelling Sequences and Resting), these could be referenced.  But maybe a stronger connection would work too....Once I write up the attributes, I'll work with the labels and see how it looks.

...but Im beginning to wonder if skills like (say) Archery 4, or Fireball 2, are really going to help the players use their characters to explore the game world.

No need to worry here.  Even though I was going to institute specific attributes into the rules, they were still going to retain their original breadth, and center as much on general abilities rather than specific skills.  Gearing them towards travel and other events, rather than combat, is also my plan, and the main reason for doing the codification.

...have you considered the possibility though that using Narrative Points in this way could turn your game very much into a story about good things vs bad things? ...whereas I think originally with NPs you were aiming for the kind of play where people ask "How can I earn and spend NPs in a way that's interesting to me (and my buddies)".

Ideally, yes, I'd like to just have players be saying "here's a neat idea" all the time.  And they can still do that.  But based on my playtest, and what others have said on how this usually works out, I think some gentle prodding might be necessary.  A straight good/bad dichotomy could probably become overstated, but as you say, it's often pretty clear in LoTR, at least once a situation is clearly defined.  I was imagining players at least some of the time introducing an ambigious element just for fun, and then letting someone else or the GM decide whether it was actually on their side or the enemy's.  This might be like when Aragorn et al meet the Riders of Rohan, or the hobbits meet Tom Bombadil -- their exact nature and orientation is not quite clear.  I'm hoping that will be fun to play with, but as you say, only a playtest will tell.

Is hope something that directs me & my character? As in do I try to roleplay out my current hope rating[?]...Or is hope something that I'm very much in control of? Can I burn up hope points[?]"

You know, I hadn't thought of this actually.  I was planning on the former, most definitely, but most everything else in the game is moee along the latter lines you propose.  This is supposed to be about shared narration, and I don't want the GM taking too big a piece of the pie (although clearly a sizeable one) so maybe that's the way to go.  Resting would similarly become a voluntary, "I'd like to have some more Hope, since I know I'll need it in Moria, so I'd better rest up in Rivendell now" kind of thing.  Did you have any thoughts as to how Hope might be made more or less important for one character over another?  Or would the player's choices about how to use it be the only definition (Rob tends to use hope a lot when playing Boromir, so we say that Boromir is heavily dependant on Hope)?

[ThreeGee]

Hey Jasper,

I am curious what role you see attributes playing in your game. Skills seem to cover anything a player might want to do. I definitely support the idea of making a list of acceptable skills as an example to players, proving to them that the game really is not about combat or effectiveness, but about player-driven exploration of the environment.

Hope is a perfect example of something that sounds sim-like to me, and Tony picked right up on it. I would suggest keeping personal themes, etc, in the hands of the players and describing possible arcs in the text. Hope sounds like something that should be positive, like SAs in tRoS. Unless you do want to make a sim-nar hybrid, I do not see any way that despair can be introduced without the player doing so on his own. Perhaps a player can bank hope now to use it later, with the amount determined by how far into despair he wants the character to go before emerging in a suitable climactic manner.

I love the idea for your game and I await the next step in its development.

Later,
Grant

[Mike Holmes]

Hope, to be more Narrativist, needs to work more like Humanity in Sorcerer,or even better like Animus/Dark Animus in Paladin. That is, decisions that the player makes about actions that the character takes should mechanically affect hope. And there should be incentive to go each way.

How about spending Hope to purchase Narrative Points? Basically the character narrates some sort of aparent loss when this happens (or reacts to some loss), like an NPC getting offed (think Gandalf falling). His Hope goes down representing the charater's dismay at the development, and he gets NPs. Seems to fit right in with your idea of getting NPs when the player introduces conflict. This is cool because the Hope trait limits NPs that can be purchased.

The player can then spend NPs at any point to get Hope back by narrating some uplifting turn of events. So, the points can be transferred back and forth as long as suitable events are desccribed. Basically the description is the "charge" for the exchange. Hmm. Actually you could build in a reward there, and have the transferred amount increase on the way accross.

What do NPs do again? I assume you burn them to create other stuff, ect?

Lesse. To get your Hope dependant types, etc, simply say that any time they do a transfer to the Hope side that they get a the bonus. And the "doomed" sorts are the opposite, gaining a bigger bonus in NP when a transfer of Hope is made.

Thus, you'll have the Hopeful characters who get less basic stats, but usually have an abunbdance of Hope to help them out. Then you'll have the doomed men types who have good stats but rarely much Hope to help them out.

Link these to Values such that the losses, gains must relate to a Value.

Needs tweaking to work just right, but what do you think?

Mike

[Tony Irwin]

The player can then spend NPs at any point to get Hope back by narrating some uplifting turn of events. So, the points can be transferred back and forth as long as suitable events are desccribed. Basically the description is the "charge" for the exchange. Hmm. Actually you could build in a reward there, and have the transferred amount increase on the way accross.

What do NPs do again? I assume you burn them to create other stuff, ect?

Lesse. To get your Hope dependant types, etc, simply say that any time they do a transfer to the Hope side that they get a the bonus. And the "doomed" sorts are the opposite, gaining a bigger bonus in NP when a transfer of Hope is made.

Thus, you'll have the Hopeful characters who get less basic stats, but usually have an abunbdance of Hope to help them out. Then you'll have the doomed men types who have good stats but rarely much Hope to help them out.

Cool! An extra bonus to an approach like is that it actually offers two different character types for two different styles of play. If I don't really "get" this whole narration thing and am just looking forward to playing in Jasper's adventure then I can build a big bad swordsman with a tonne of skills. On the other hand if I love making stuff up for the game as we go along then I can go for the hobbit with not so good skills but more influence on what's actually coming up next.

Its actually something I've been thinking about in my own little LotR project, having two basic classes of character. One type is for players who want to experience an LotR adventure. The other type is for players who want to get involved in creating an adventure LotR. Mike's idea looks like a good way of doing that.

Did you have any thoughts as to how Hope might be made more or less important for one character over another? Or would the player's choices about how to use it be the only definition (Rob tends to use hope a lot when playing Boromir, so we say that Boromir is heavily dependant on Hope)?

Tying it into NPs sounds like a really interesting possibility. If you decide to go that way you could certainly justify it in terms of the books (or at least the movie!). Boromir gives into despair and kind of loses the ability to "make things happen". Even if you've never read the book before you can see he's just on a road to doom and he's pretty powerless to do anything about his eventual destiny. Gandalf however is upbeat all the time, and that hope enables him to constantly turn the tables in surprising ways at the last possible minute. Actually it would work for the hobbits as well - its their surprising determination and cheery natures that allows them to keep at it and unexpectedly turn the whole War of the Ring around. "Even the littlest person can change the world..." (or whatever).

Tony

[Jasper]

Hello,

Great stuff here, everyone.  You're absolutely right, this game is predominantly Narrative, and the ultimate goals I've set for it *are* narrativist inclined.  Treating Hope so differently -- in more of a sim way -- was definitely a disconnect.  I'd always wanted to tie Hope at least indirectly to Narrative points, since players can call up "resting places" where hope is given out if nothing else.  But I like the more direct causal line, which -- in combination with Tony's "banking" of points -- gives the control back to the player.  

The "dual character concepts" ideas was something I have had from the beginning, spawned by the three main mechanics (attributes, hero points, narrative points).  I imagined that Frodo was driven by hero points, Legolas by attributes, and Merry and Pippin by narrative points mostly -- though obviously everyone has a bit of each.  I want to keep this for the reasons you outline Tony: players can each play ot their own styles, and it supports greater character definition.

Here's sort of a quickly distilled version of all of this, working in a few other things as well:


There are three kinds of transactions where Hope is involved: Gaining it, Using it, and being Inspired (these names suck, I know, but they're temporary):

Using Hope: While narrative points allow a player to introduce new elements into a scene outside of how own character, the use of hope allows him to influence that character'sperformance in a positive way.  Spending Hope gives extra dice to roll in a conflict.  Appropriate narration, connoting renewed determination or somesuch should accompany.

Buying Hope is the reciprocal of using it: rather then spending points to become hopeful and gain dice, the player narrates an emotional defeat and an accompanying loss of dice in order to gain points.  Thus, he is effectively "putting hope in the bank" for later use.

Inspiration: Hope can be gained without a corresponding defeat when a character is inspired.  This happens in two main ways.  First, he can honor one of his values dispite some set-back in the plot: this bolsters his sense of self-worth and identity, giving Hope points.  Secondly, external stimulus can bring on hope.  This stimulus event might be relatively mundane, but undeniably positive -- probably affecting one of the character's values or goals --  or it could be truly wondrous.  These events can be introduced in three ways: by the GM; by a player when he spends Narrative Points; with the narration of an extremeley good victory roll in conflict resolution (which is effectively a granting of immediate-use narrative points -- in a sense, all these three uses are really the spending of Narrative points, just in different contexts by different people).


I hope this accurately captures the meat of the ideas that have been floating around here -- though some compromises were made, obviously.  I'm still giving some thought to the disproportionate interchange Mike suggested between Hope and NPs based on character.   I guess I worry about the distinctions becoming too prominant and defining: mechanically, the range to work with is not great, so we might end up with a real dichotomy.   Of course, some people will want to be strongly definied by their Values as well.  I'm dying to do another playtest, just as soon as I finish writing up the plot mapping guidelines.

[Jasper]

Hello,

Since some people expressed interest in this project, and I'm always eager for more feedback (as everyone is), I thought I'd just announce here that I've completely rewritten the rules from the ground up, including most of the changes discussed here.  It think this rework makes it more comprehensive and unified than the previously jumbled rules, and I'm happy I did it.

I believe that this version is wholly playable, since it is self-contained.  A few bits (like magic) need more explanation, but it is basically completed.  Right now I'm mostly working at writing in extended examples of play -- a few have already made it in.  If you're interested, it's at:

http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~jasperm/WW_3.htm

Any comments are very welcome.