Persona - Just in Time Roleplaying

[LordSmerf]

Ok.  I see your point on Fragment lists.  Even though i may disagree, it's more of a personal thing than something concrete.  I just don't like lists for stuff like that.  I see the advantages that they can provide, but i tend to believe that most of that can/should be handled by Social Contract.  At this point i don't believe i really have anything to add in terms of Fragments.

However, i would like to discuss your dice mechanic.  Have you considered anything else?  A game always seems much more polished when you have a dice mechanic that meshes well.

Thomas

[Tim C Koppang]

Thomas,

Sounds good to me.  Let's talk dice.

I thought I'd start out with a bit of history on what has already been covered in terms of dice by Persona before getting into what I hope to accomplish with dice in the future.  Ben already did a nice bit of summing up.  I thought I'd just spell it out here for the sake of completeness.

1) Persona debuts with a 1D6 mechanic.  There's no dice thresholds, but the dice explode.
2) We tried 1DX, where X was determined by the total number of CPs your character had (dice thresholds).
3) Then we added two more base dice, so it was 3DX.  3D6 was the default and we usually ended up playing most sessions with only D6s, unless someone complained or reminded the GM.
4) I started working more closely with the Persona text and concluded that using all of those different sided dice was pain.  The system as it stands now was developed.  However, at this point there was a major division between the dice threshold advocates and the no dice threshold people.

All in all, things haven't really ever changed drastically from the original idea.  Still, I think that I came to see dice as essential tools in Persona.

For one, I believe that randomness in Persona can have a big effect on the way unskilled characters develop.  While a newbie player is going to have enough CPs to succeed at whatever he wants, (a) he still needs to choose how to represent his character with Fragments and (b) successful die rolls are going to significantly influence his choices.  Similarly, when a player gets a really low die roll on a check his character is unskilled at, that player may be tempted to alter his character concept to include a new area.  In this way, the dice help to shape a character in unskilled, or maybe more precisely, undefined areas.  The advantage of doing this randomly is of course that the player will be in for some surprises.

So why not have players roll only when they lack any applicable Fragments?  Consistency for one.  Moreover, even in areas where a character is well defined, a die roll (low or high) may supply the one or two points necessary to force the player into making a decision about his character's Fragments.

Here's another way to put it.  At the start of a challenge, Player rolls some dice.  He either gets a "lucky" result or an "unlucky" result.  If he get the "lucky" result, he doesn't have to buy any Fragments and the game proceeds with the character succeeding.  If on the other hand, he gets the "unlucky" result, then that player must make a choice.  He can either buy enough Fragments to ensure that his character succeeds, or he can let his character fail.  Character development is a result of that initial choice and the specific Fragments a player chooses to buy (or not buy).

You'll also notice that it's very important for the die roll to come before a player is allowed to purchase Fragments.

Here's a wild idea I just came up with.  This is off the cuff, so bear with me:

What if I used a mechanic similar to Fudge (No Fudge dice.  I'm just referencing the concept), where a die roll could result in a positive or negative number?  It might even be weighted towards the positive, or negative--I don't know.  Let's make the numbers easy for now.  How about a player has a 50% chance of getting an "unlucky" or "lucky" roll.  If the result is positive, he succeeds by a degree equal to the excess of his DR.  If the result is negative, he of course must buy X number of Fragment levels in order to succeed, where X is equal to the degree of failure.  I suppose you could make it even simpler by getting rid of the degree of success, but I'm not sure I like that.

Ex: DR=10.  Player rolls dice, and gets a positive 3.  He succeeds by a degree of 3.

Ex: DR=10.  Player rolls dice, and gets a negative 4.  Player already has 2 point of applicable Fragment levels.  He needs to buy 2  more Fragment levels in order to succeed.

Thoughts?

Regards.

[alessan]

Tim,


hmmmm......  dice........  I agree with everything you said, until your wild idea :).

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "degrees" of sucess.  What seems to have happened in your examples is that the dice are now only +1 or -1 results and there is no exploding or any other numbers available.  There are 2 big problems I can see with this:
1) negative dice.  I really hate these.  It may be just a persona thing, but if I roll dice, and suddenly I fighting the dice instead of them just helping me as much as they can, I begin to totally hate them.  Take for an example Vampire.  A 1 on a dice takes away a success...  There is nothing more frustrating in the world than to roll 3 successes and 4 ones, thereby not only failing, but also botching the roll in the process.
2)  What about the variable effect of persona.  One of the great pieces of Persona is that the fragments apply unevenly based on how appropriate the fragment is.  Therefore, if I am striking a blow at my adversery, I get to add my adversary fragment, but if I am fighting him in a 1:1 death match where only one man will leave, I get to add soem multiple of my fragment level.  Suddenly, in this situation, the die roll becomes meaningless (you'd always overwhelm any negative result).  The obvious solution to that is to only have fragments count their level, but this gets rid of a good aspect of the game IMHO.


So, I guess I'm really wanting some additional examples and explation about this dice idea of yours :)

-Ben

[Tim C Koppang]

Ben,

Whoa.  Somewhere in my explanation we had a disconnect, or maybe I just need to explain myself a little better.

First of all, modifiers, dice explosions, results other than +1 or -1: these are all still in.  Forget about the Fudge dice.  I knew as soon as I mentioned them, I was making trouble for myself.  Forget about the Fudge dice.

I haven't worked out the specifics yet, but what I'm advocating is a system that allows for both negative and positive results.  The negative and positive results can be of any value.  So you might roll a -2, or a -5, or even a -9.  Same goes for positive.  Just like in Persona now, you can roll a +1 or a +28,345 as long as you keep getting those explosions.

A degree of success is just the difference between what you rolled and the Difficulty Rating.  So if I rolled a 17 and my DR was 10, then my degree of success is a 7 (17-10=7).  Same in the negative.  Ex: DR=10.  I roll a -5.  My degree of failure is a 5 (10-5=5).  The degrees tell the player how awesome his character is, or in some cases how badly his character fucked up.

Now I add in Fragments.  Let's use the same examples.  My degree of success before Fragments is 7.  I have 4 points of applicable Fragment levels.  Furthermore, let's say that my 2 point Fragments is being used in a particularly appropriate way and gets a (x2) modifier.  So 4, plus the extra points that I get from the modifier, equals 6.  Now my degree of success is 13 (7+2*2+2=13).

For the negative result: Degree of Failure = -5.  I have 4 points of applicable Fragment levels, plus 2 after the modifier, equals a new Degree of Success of 1 (-5+2*2+2=1).  If I wouldn't have had enough Fragments to bring me into the positive I'd either fail or I'd have to buy more Fragments.

Does this make more sense?  Moreover, please notice that I'm specifically not mentioning how to accomplish this with dice.  This is all still in the, "do you think this sort of system would work well?" phase.

As for your aversion to negative results, all I can say is: can you think of a way to accomplish the above without creating that feeling of frustration?  Your comparison to Vampire, I think, is not entirely fair.  I'm not suggesting that the player rolls X successes, but then ends up losing anyway because of a handful of 1s.  I am suggesting that the result is always only positive or only negative.  So it's not as if the mechanic swipes victory away from the player just when things were looking up, but rather the player will know right away if he succeeded or failed.

The only thing I can imagine creating a real sense of frustration is making the player roll exploding negative dice.  Hehe.  Actually, that's kinda funny in a twisted sort of way.

Regards.

[Tim C Koppang]

Thomas,

I think I overlooked an intriguing suggestion you posted earlier:

My suggestion would be either to use no dice or dice based on Fragments (where you can always buy more Fragments, roll more dice, and add them post facto).

I'm a bit confused (confused and intrigued) by the second part of the above sentence.  Are you suggesting some sort of cyclical purchase Fragments, roll dice system?  Could you hash this out a bit more for me, please?

Regards.

[Tim C Koppang]

Ok, new idea.  Judging from the lack of response to wild idea #1, I'm guessing people have at best a mediocre response to it.

Ben, your idea of fighting the dice got all mashed up with what's already been said and I came up with wild idea #2.

What if every time you rolled the dice, the result was "negative?"  I'm putting that in quotes, because as you'll see in a minute, it's not the same sort of negative I was describing up above.

Basically, I was thinking that the purpose of dice rolls is to both judge how well a character performs, and (mostly) to encourage character discovery through Fragment purchase.  So how about this:

A challenge is initialized, but instead of the GM announcing a Difficulty Rating, she chooses the number of dice the player will roll.  In the end this serves the same function as a Difficulty Rating however.  A low number of dice means the challenge is easier (less character discovery).  A high number means the a harder difficulty (more need to buy Fragments).

Ex: Sarah is GMing.  Jon gets his character into a challenge situation.  Sarah thinks that this scene has the potential to really develop Jon's character, or to force Jon to make some serious character-based decisions.  Sarah chooses, let's say, 3 dice worth of difficulty.

The next step: player rolls the dice.  Now, the way I'm thinking about this there won't be any exploding or stacking dice.  You just roll all the dice the GM gives you and you add them together.

Ex: Jon takes up his 3 dice, rolls them, and gets a 6, 2, and 1.  He does not re-roll the 6, but instead adds up all three for a total of 9.

But instead of the total being a positive number, it actually represents the number of Fragment levels a player has to come up with in order to succeed.  So, if a player rolls a 1, he has to have 1 Fragment level.  If he rolls an 11, he needs 11 points.  You can add existing Fragments, or purchase new ones.  And of course, modifiers apply.

Ex: Jon needs to come up with 9 Fragment levels to succeed.  He has 4 points already, from Fragments he purchased on previous challenges, and one of those Fragments even receives a modifier!  So his total is now 6--still 3 points shy of his goal.  So now Jon has to either buy three more levels, or choose to fail.

This way a player is always discovering character, or at least he's always up against a real challenge.  Of course, if he rolls well and has enough applicable Fragments to see him through, he won't need to buy any new ones, but pressure is always on.

I like this idea a lot more than the one I presented above.  Thoughts?

Regards.

[LordSmerf]

Ok.  Sorry it took so long to get back to you.  Let's take things in the order they come.

+/- Dice.  If you use this system then you don't need any sort of DR.  You can just assume that the DR for everything is 0 since the rolled modifier is your result.  I think this might work out rather well.  To keep things simple i'd advocate the use of only two dice.  For this example i'll use d10s.  They need to be different colors (this is not a d10-d10 though) and you choose one to be positive and one to be negative.  Roll the dice, 10s stack, whichever result is higher is the one you use, if they are the same then assume 0.  This gives you a 9.1% chance of rolling a 0 result.  You could even have more negative or positive dice in order to weigh the result in a given direction.  If you want a negative result to be more common roll two negative dice and one positive, etc.  You might want to let positive values give you CP back, that would provide a mechanic other than "The GM says you get some CP now."

My nebulous earlier suggestion.  What i meant was this: instead of your Fragments being a modifier to the roll, they are the number of dice rolled.  Such that you roll Xd6 where X is the total applicable Fragment value.  This could get cumbersome if you get above 8 or so dice.  Anyway the idea was that you either have to have a certain total (the value of the sum of your dice must be at least 20 or whatever the DR is), or that you have to have a certain number of successes (4,5,6 are successes, you must have 4 successes, or whatever the DR is).  In either case you can still use stacking dice.  The key here is that if you don't have enough successes you may purchase a Fragment level after the roll, roll it, and add it to your original roll.

Your final suggestion, that dice produce DR is workable.  I'm not sure i really like it, but i can't put my finger on why.  It seems to directly produce the feeling that Ben was complaining about: it feels like the dice are hurting you rather than helping you.  Now, i don't have a problem with that myself, but there's something about it that just doesn't sit right.

Thomas