Rapidly changing stats

[TonyLB]

There's something bugging me in my system.  It's a silly little factor, but I can't get it out of my mind and maybe someone has a perfect solution.

I have some traits that go up and down rapidly during play.  I could easily imagine the number going from zero to five and back to zero in one scene.  There are five of these traits.

Functionally they're sort of dramatic credit accounts that people raise as they draw advantage from them and reduce as they accept disadvantage due to them.

I'd like to make the mechanic of spending and paying back support the game rather than conflict with it.  I remember vividly in Champions, which had a similar system of tracking and regaining Endurance, that the whole system typically got ignored because the paperwork was such a tremendous drag on the flow of the game.

Do people have a recommendation for a better way to present this?  Different mechanics?  Tokens or M&Ms?  It's a fiddly little thing, but as I said it's been bothering me.

[ethan_greer]

Games often use tokens, candies, chips, beads, and the like for this sort of thing. That'd be my suggestion.  I believe the new Marvel RPG went so far as to have little spaces on the character sheet in which to move the beads around.

[Michael S. Miller]

Hi Tony

For things that vary, I've noticed two historical trends: tokens (e.g., M:tG, 7th Sea) and paper clips on the side of the character sheet (e.g., Deadlands, Sorcerer).

If they're varying as quickly as several times a scene, I think I'd stay away from the paper clip thing, as it could wear through your paper before too long.

As for tokens, I suggest putting on the character sheets five circles the same size as a penny. Do this for each of your five variable stats. When they "draw advantage," they reach over to whichever player is "banker" and take however-many pennies and put them on their sheet. You'll be able to tell your current ranking at a glance, plus the players get to physically manipulate something in play. I think this is often overlooked in game design, and emphasizing it will be a nice touch.

[TonyLB]

I like the idea of physically manipulating things as a reinforcement of the abstract rulings.

I'm not sure why I keep thinking that something other than tokens is worth looking for.  I suppose one thing is that my current play group has a pretty good ritual space going where we lounge on couches in a conversation nook, but it doesn't really work for dice or tokens.  Maybe I'm just suffering from table-phobia :-)

[Valamir]

How many traits do you have that fluctuate?

If not too many, make the tokens rings or small rubber bands that can be put on your finger to track the current score.  That would work from a lounging perspective.

[John Harper]

Five traits. Five fingers. Coincidence?

I love Ralph's rubberband idea.

[TonyLB]

Oh, that is cute.

My other thought was that there are (last I checked) five colors of M&Ms.  You could just have a bowl and dump them all in.  But then it would be a pain to actually sort through and find out what your trait value was at any point.

I'm liking the creativity, and definitely keeping some of these ideas for future games, even if I'll probably end up going for a table-and-tokens solution.

Hrm... it's a superhero game... but I can't think of anything really distinctly superheroic.  There are only so many capes, masks and cowls that one person can wear, after all.

[Michael S. Miller]

You can get magnetic bingo chips, and craft stores sell adhesive magnetic strips (for folks who want to make their own refrigerator magnets). Put the strips on a clipboard, and you should be able to lounge all you want, and have your tokens stick to the character sheet. This is something I haven't actually tried, but would like to some day.

[timfire]

Have you actually playtested this game, and was keeping track of points an issue? Or are you just worried that it might be an issue?

In my game, the Mountain Witch, each character has a 'Trust' pool for each other character (thus the number of pools will vary from 2 to 5). The amount of points starts low, at 2 per character, but can rise to 6 or 7 per char. Now, the players are likely to spend most, if not all of their points every scene, as the pools refresh at the start of a new scene.

Thus far tracking these points on paper has not been an issue. Granted, it sounds like there's slightly less bookkeeping in my game than in your's; but still, I wouldn't worry about this until it's proven itself to be an issue in playtesting.

[TonyLB]

I have actually playtested a little, and it was a bit of a problem, but that may have been exacerbated by other factors.  I'll give it a try without specific preparation and see how it goes.

[Lxndr]

Fastlane's attributes can change pretty often - it's all but guaranteed that at least one will change during any given scene, for each player participating.  I handled it in the games I played in part with bank chips, and part with just circles that are filled out in a scale-type format (basically stealing from Vampire's "dot" stuff).

[TonyLB]

I've also noticed that attributes that change in only one direction are much easier to deal with on paper... just keep filling in little circles as it goes up, for instance.

Now technically you could have two rows of circles, one to fill in when it's supposed to go up, and a second to fill in when its supposed to go down, and the number more dots in one line than the other is the value.  Seems clumsy though, if the actual number of dots in the line itself isn't independently meaningful.