Emotions Mechanics II: Emotion as Power

[Sydney Freedberg]

Sydney, in the game Hero Quest, characters have "personality traits" that are handled precisely like any other ability. ... So, if my character has "Bouts of Rage" or something, then when he's angry, he can use that to augment, say, attacking somebody. When he's trying to calmly argue with somebody, this becomes a penalty....Seems simple, and solved to me.

I'd agree the problem of passions as abiding and reliable character traits is solved (e.g. TROS Spiritual Attributes, UA Obsessions & Triggers, HQ peronality traits). I'd disagree about the problem of unpredictable emotional reactions, where a character could go either way. So I think this issue of volatility is the one to focus on.

Or how about this: players can at any time declare an emotion their character is laboring under. When this is the case, the character gains an appropriate emotion bonus in the conflict at hand, but the GM narrates character action.

Interesting. Extreme, but interesting. Maybe an option for going berserk rather than being moderately ticked off.

The system of Dying Earth is the obvious answer, as social situations in it are handled largely the same as combat.

Okay, I keep hearing interesting things about Dying Earth. Now I have another bloody game I've got to buy....

[John Kim]

The Ars Magica, Pendragon, and Theatrix examples of applying passions, possibly through the expenditure of some kind of plot points, are good ones -- BUT because they generally do the same thing in a reliable way, often under direct player control, they still don't address the volatility of emotional reactions (e.g. the drive to the extremes that TonyLB talks about). They don't hand the player a ticking time bomb of emotional energy and say, "Now what?"

So let me refocus my question more precisely: How might a game portray the nature of emotions not only as a power-up, but as an inherently unpredictable and even dangerous one?  

Well, the Pendragon mechanic is not under direct player control (though it is for Theatrix and mostly so for Ars Magica).  In Pendragon (1st ed), passions can result in inspiration based on either GM call or a player request (with GM approval).  So the GM can judge that a passion roll is called for, you make the roll and suddenly your character is powered up with inspiration and should act appropriately.  

This procedure is achieving unpredictability by taking control out of the hands of the player and putting it in the hands of the GM and/or die rolls. I guess it depends on what you want out of unpredictability.  My experience has been that player-controlled emotions can be highly unpredictable and I still find them interesting.  But that depends on the players and one's point-of-view, I suppose.  

The goal here would be to make a character's emotional reactions as complex, unpredictable, and exciting as, say, combat (in a well-designed system, obviously, not a hit-point-plinking "I hit you, you hit me, repeat" system), or demon-human interactions in Sorcerer. The hope is for players to have as much fun with the emotion mechanics as they would with combat mechanics in a more traditional game.

OK, a topic question.  I think you've got at least some idea of the sort of  mechanics which you are looking for here (i.e. dice-using mechanics with numbers for emotional states and/or personality traits).  Are you interested in general for ways to explore and portray emotion in role-playing?  This will involve a compare-and-contrast of numerical mechanics against non-quantified approaches.  Or are you more interested in detailed design of the mechanical approach?

[Sydney Freedberg]

My experience has been that player-controlled emotions can be highly unpredictable and I still find them interesting.

A very good point. Player control doesn't always equal predictability.

OK, a topic question.  I think you've got at least some idea of the sort of  mechanics which you are looking for here (i.e. dice-using mechanics with numbers for emotional states and/or personality traits).  Are you interested in general for ways to explore and portray emotion in role-playing?  This will involve a compare-and-contrast of numerical mechanics against non-quantified approaches.  Or are you more interested in detailed design of the mechanical approach?

Errr... yes to both? I have indeed a dice-based, quantified mechanic in mind (described in outline a few posts back) but I'm not satisfied with it, hence my seeking input. In any case, this is not a "Design" thread but a "Theory" thread, so I have no desire to confine the discussion to any mechanic of mine.

So I would be interested in any approach to emotion that meets these three criteria:
1) An actual mechanic, not "just roleplay it"
2) Allows emotion to be a source of power (story power, combat effectiveness, whatever)
3) Captures ("simulates" if you insist) the volatility and unpredictability of both real-life and fictional emotional reactions

Of course, since nobody died and made me Ron Edwards, I have no power (nor desire) to lock / split / close / mangle the thread if someone says "all your criteria are nonsense, you silly little man, and I'm going to talk about this instead."

[M. J. Young]

How might a game portray the nature of emotions not only as a power-up, but as an inherently unpredictable and even dangerous one?

This is brainstorming, and there's probably a way to simplify it, but let me throw this out for consideration.

I'm envisioning what might be called a "sweet spot" resolution system. I'd gear it such that I want to roll as close to a target number as possible, but not over it. Using a percentile system as an example, I'll suggest that the target number is something around 70; the emotion, if activated, must be called into play before the roll, and it adds its value to the roll.

The roll uses relative success up to the target number; thus a roll of 1 is such a meager success it's very nearly a failure. This incentivizes the use of the emotion, because you can eliminate meager successes quickly. Also, since the target number is significantly above the midpoint of the range, the odds are that you'll roll low enough that the addition will help you.

If you don't invoke the emotion, then any roll above 70 becomes failure; you can use relative failure if you like. However, if you invoke the emotion, exceeding the target number creates "overdone", and you messed up because your emotion carried you too far.

That, anyway, is a quick sketch. Thoughts?

--M. J. Young

[Marhault]

How might a game portray the nature of emotions not only as a power-up, but as an inherently unpredictable and even dangerous one? *snip* The hope is for players to have as much fun with the emotion mechanics as they would with combat mechanics in a more traditional game.

Hey, Sydney.  You should check out Legends of Alyria.  All emotional and personality traits are two edged swords which can be used by the character to empower themselves, or against the character to weaken them in any conflict.

[captain_bateson]

I'm not sure that if this response answers anything brought up in this thread or not, but it occurred to me while reading the previous posts, so here goes.

I once played in a game with an ultra-realistic combat system. Big time. Getting shot usually meant a severe wound with months of bed rest or death. The system went into detail about where you'd been hit and what kind of damage you'd taken (so you get stuff like fingers blown off, static shock, collapsed lungs, etc.) The players and characters had to deal with the often devastating effects of combat-related injuries and wounds.

The interesting effect of this ultra-realistic combat system was that it obviated the need for a mechanic for emotions in combat: the players quickly became just as afraid of fights OOC as IC.

I think this is different than "just roleplaying it." The game essentially, through game mechanics other than blunt-force "emotion mechanics" fostered an emotional state in the players that was reflected in how they played their characters.

So, one way to foster appropriate emotional reactions in player characters is to have game mechanics which impose consequences that help create a similar emotional state in the players as that their characters would have.

I think part of the reason that some people feel there is a need for emotion mechanics in some games is that the existing game mechanics don't support the emotions the GM and/or game designer thinks the characters should have.

For instance, in, say, D&D, the player of a high-level character, being familiar with the game mechanics, knows that his or her character has a gazillion hit points and is unlikely to get killed in combat. So, the player, and his or her character, isn't afraid to charge into battle. Is this just a metagaming (I don't know what the Forge term is for metagaming, if there is one) problem? I don't think so. Because, by the time a character gets to be high level, he or she would have figured out what the rules of his or her world are and would know from past experience whether he or she is likely to get seriously injured or killed in a given combat.

So, ultimately, the GM/game designer who feels that a high-level D&D character should be fearful about and during combat isn't taking into account that the combat mechanics defuse the root cause of fear in combat. In general, combat isn't scary just because it's combat. Combat is scary because other motivated agents are actively trying to injure, disable, and or kill you who may succeed. If a game's combat mechanics lessen the threat of death or injury and make it unlikely that a character's opponents can succeed in killing or injuring him or her, then, even though the character is in combat, he or she will not be scared. I think sometimes we confuse "combat is scary" with "someone trying to kill or hurt you who might be able to do so is scary."

Emotions, after all, are basically reactions to things. When, in a game, as GM or designer, we remove the thing to which people are really reacting, naturally, the player and the character fail to have expected emotional responses. Removing the danger and leaving the combat, and then imposing fear upon the character is kind of incoherent, actually.

Anyway, this is just one way to deal with emotions in games. I'm not saying that it works all or most of the time. It won't work in all kinds of situations: for instance, in horror games, there's only so much a designer or GM can do to invoke fear in the players without the them calling the police. And there are definitely ALL KINDS of problems with ultra-realism in games, not just GNS stuff, but also games in which ultra-realism isn't desired or appropriate (say, like in a Star Wars game). I don't even really like ultra-realism most of the time (I play Amber, after all). It was fun that one time, but I wouldn't like it in general. I'm just saying that, from my experience, one way of helping deal with emotional issues in games is to have the game support those issues with its mechanics. I think this is subtly different than the kinds of emotion mechanics being discussed, so I thought I would throw my thoughts in the ring.

[Sydney Freedberg]

I'm envisioning what might be called a "sweet spot" resolution system. I'd gear it such that I want to roll as close to a target number as possible, but not over it. ....the emotion, if activated, must be called into play before the roll, and it adds its value to the roll..... exceeding the target number creates "overdone", and you messed up because your emotion carried you too far.

Now that's a really interesting idea (vaguely reminiscent of Teenagers From Outer Space, where you can "succeed too much"). I'd never seen the point of "blackjack"-style resolution before, but this might be the reason God allows them to exist.

Downside: It could make applying any other modifier to the roll tricky (e.g. you can't just add +20 for higher skill, because then higher skill also creates the possibility of overdoing it), so it requires further thought. But I'll play with it a little.

[Ben O'Neal]

Just to throw in a random comment that is vaguely on-track with this topic...

A while back I was tossing around a "Black-Jack" style relationship mechanic for when you meet people, because I was feeling very cynical at the time and thought it was an apt analogy. But basically it goes like this: You play Black-Jack, with real cards, playing against the character you wish to form a relationship with. The closer you get to 21, the higher your feelings towards that person. If you go over, you fall in love. You take the difference between your result and that of the other person, and use this to determine the mis-match of feeling. If one goes over 21, and the other does not, the relationship is doomed. If both go over, both fall in love. If neither go over, the relationship will forever be a friendship or mere association (depending on the value of the result).

When making rolls or whatever, you suffer the inverse difference between your result and their result to any rolls against that person. So that if your result was 13, and theirs was 19, then the difference is +6, so you suffer -6 to your rolls against them, because they are much more motivated towards you, than you to them. "Against them" includes trying to help them.

If your result is below 10, then you begin to not like them at all (because a result of 10 or less in Black-Jack means you are either stupid or not wanting to win). So below 10, you gain the proportional difference between your results as a bonus to rolls against them, because you are motivated by dislike of them.


Anyways, that's just an idea I had which is using some of the ideas expressed here in some way, and since I discarded it a few months ago, I thought I'd throw it out here. The main problem is that it's too bipolar and linear, with a line between love and hate.

I think I'd be intensely interested in seeing mechanics for relationships/emotions which factor the interactions of multiple emotions and their likely effects, as well as the individuals ability to control certain emotions. The best idea I've been able to come up with is a "disposition chart", which is a numbered lsit of emotions. You pick one emotion to be your "default" disposition, and then circumstances would require you to roll to "fluctuate" about that disposition. So that a normally happy person would require something incredibly strong to make them angry, whilst the reverse would be true for someone with an angry disposition. Then you could have individual biases, which would effect how easily you moved towards certain dispositions, acting like a "magnet" of sorts for key dispositions, to try to emulate how some people seem drawn to a few key emotions more than others. However, it all gets very complicated and becomes alot of bookeeping and chart-tracking. This becomes even more compounded if I throw in the ability for relationships, where some people have differing effects on a character's disposition than others, manifest as modifiers to rolls based on results of previous rolls...... very complex. Definately a task for a computer.

But that's enough of my rambling.

-Ben

[contracycle]

A while back I was tossing around a "Black-Jack" style relationship mechanic for when you meet people, because I was feeling very cynical at the time and thought it was an apt analogy. But basically it goes like this: You play Black-Jack, with real cards, playing against the character you wish to form a relationship with. The closer you get to 21, the higher your feelings towards that person. If you go over, you fall in love. You take the difference between your result and that of the other person, and use this to determine the mis-match of feeling. If one goes over 21, and the other does not, the relationship is doomed. If both go over, both fall in love. If neither go over, the relationship will forever be a friendship or mere association (depending on the value of the result).

I think thats excellently elegant, nice work.

The best idea I've been able to come up with is a "disposition chart", which is a numbered lsit of emotions. You pick one emotion to be your "default" disposition, and then circumstances would require you to roll to "fluctuate" about that disposition.

We have IMO a predisposition to lists which is entirely an artifact of the mechanical medium to date, the reliance on text printing.  An alternative would be to make a plane chart with different zones indicating different emotional responses.  This gives you an area to work with instead of a line; an area can be more easily and fluidly differentiated.

If this plane were organised as an array of cells and a system constructed to determine when and how you roll on both axes to determine the cell indicating the characters present state.  Perhaps you could have rules for moving from one cell to the next, showing a migration of mentality or a mood change.

The downside of course is that you would need one for each character, or one for each 'personality type' OR the capacity for players to generate these at home; ie.e a system or algorithm that is part of the rule text.

[Sydney Freedberg]

God, I love this forum. There are more good ideas every time I turn around.

Okay, everyone. First, troop over to the latest thread on TonyLB's draft superpower game, Capes. Now bow down before the awesomeness of TonyLB. I know I do.

Now, Tony's thoughts in Capes about powering-up by going into emotional / motivational debt, which you can then gamble your way out of or deeper into, and various ideas on this thread (especially M.J. Young's blackjack-style mechanic), all congealed last night in a sleep-disrupting burst of what I think is insight. To wit:

Gambling.

If you want to do justice to the volatile, unpredictable nature of human emotion, you make invoking emotions in the character require a game-mechnical gamble by the player. (This is related to a key insight of Tony's on the Fear and Confusion thread, that to create the proper feel of a combat situation, the players need to share some of the confusion of their characters). That is, instead of emotion being "just another stat," it's a stat that requires you to put something at risk and which increases not only your chances of success but your chances of disaster as well.

This actually goes beyond emotion mechanics. Let's say we divide all stats into two categories: the things that make you Cool, and the things that make you Heroic. The Cool is what you can always count on -- your skill with a blade, your rapier wit, your dashing good looks, your superhuman strength, etc. -- all the things traditional games include as stats / advantages / skills. Most of the time, your Cool abilities will carry you through: You use Cool to impress routine contacts and plow through mooks. Cool abilities work predictably and reliably, with little or no risk of disaster; in game-mechanics terms, either they work on a pure Karma system (I have a 6, I needed a 5, I succeed) or on a Fortune system with no critical failures, no critical successes, and a narrow range of variation.

But when the dramatic crisis hits, your Cool abilities may not be enough. (Here I'm inspired by Tony's Capes). Now what makes a hero heroic? It's not about Kewl Powerz: It's about laying yourself on the line for something you really care about -- it's about risk. In a combat situation, you gamble life and limb; in a social situation, you can gamble respect (both what others have for you and you for yourself); and in any situation, you can gamble your emotional drives -- your hope, your love, your ideals, your self-esteem. (More Capes). These Heroic Gambles add on top of your Cool abilities, but they use different mechanics: They operate off a Fortune-heavy system with a high range of variance and a serious chance of both critical successes and critical failures (preferably, it should be possible to get both at once).

And if you blow the roll, you lose some or all of what you've gambled. Did you stake your body by running out under fire to grab your wounded buddy? Bam, you got shot. Did you stake your image by trying to impress The One Your Love at the prom? Whomp, you fell down and everybody's laughing. Did you put your heart on the line for something you really cared about? Crack, your heart just broke and that love or idealism or sheer desire is gone. Presumably not all of it forever -- there should be rules for recovering from all of this -- but enough of it and for long enough to hurt.

How to implement this exactly? I'm not sure. One way might be a dice pool where the dice contributed by your Cool abilities act normally but the dice added by your Heroic Gamble can explode into critical successes and failures. (Note: I don't like dice pools, so this is a sacred-cow-shooting moment for me). Or you could have Cool abilities be pure Karma, as above, and then roll for Heroic Gambles to see if they pay off (upping your Karma) or blow up in your face (losing whatever you staked) or both at once (you succeed but at a terrible price).

Note that, especially in a grittier, more realistic game, the player is not always able to choose whether to stake something or not; if someone's putting a gun to my head or dangling my love interest from a bridge, my body (in the first case) or heart (in the second) is being gambled whether I wanted to or not.

So a whole lot of actual design work to do, including (for me) ripping up pretty much all the mechanics I've drafted for My Eventual Game. (Sacred cow massacre). But making players gamble when their characters are putting heart, soul, and body on the line seems profoundly right to me. Or does this make even half as much sense to everyone else as it does to me?[/i]

[ErrathofKosh]

Damn!  I wanted to point everyone to Tony's game...  It is a very good (if unfinished) example of this topic in action.  I too am butchering sacred cows.  Here is a thought on how a mechanic could work that involves "raising the stakes":

A character's skills and abilities are defined by karma, and in non-emotion-grabbing situations, these resolve conflicts.  However, in situations that become a little more involved, the player (or the Gm) determines how emotionally involved his character becomes.  The emotional involvement is defined by levels, each represented by a die type (borrowing from the Window).  The player rolls two of the appropriated dice of different colors.  The player then is allowed to pick one to add to his appropriate skill karma, and the other determines what happens to him emotionally.  Higher is better for success, lower is better emotionally.  

Thus, the more separated the values are, the better the character has handled the situation.  When the values are close, the character has either not added much to his skill via emotion, or he has, but in doing so, he has caused himself great emotional damage.  As the stakes go up, the potential for great success goes up, but so does the possibility of emotional backlash.

Just a few thoughts...  Probably needs a lot of polishing and such.

Jonathan

[M. J. Young]

Downside: It could make applying any other modifier to the roll tricky (e.g. you can't just add +20 for higher skill, because then higher skill also creates the possibility of overdoing it), so it requires further thought. But I'll play with it a little.

In a mechanic like this, you've got to keep a close eye on which modifiers go to the die roll and which go to the target number. There's a careful analysis of this in the text (in the combat chapter) of Multiverser, pointing out that die roll adjustments and target number adjustments do not do the same thing when you have a relative success/relative failure system.

You also have to keep an eye on the range of possible target numbers. Below a certain chance of success, it would always be a bad bet to invoke your emotion, because the odds are already against you succeeding and adding the emotion to the roll significantly worsens them.

As to the notion of gambling on the emotion, you might consider variable bonuses on the emotion part. You could create levels of emotion at d4, d8, d12, and d20 (or d6, d10, d20 in the alternative). If the emotion is called on to support the roll, you still roll the percentile dice, but also roll the bonus die which is added to it. Now the player has to account for the possibility that his emotion isn't going to help much at all as well as the possibility that it's going to push him over the top.

You also might consider looking at a positive/negative curve a la fudge for the emotion roll, one die representing the degree to which it could help and the other the degree to which it could hinder the character's efforts. I'm thinking (on the fly here) that the two dice should be close but unequal, with the negative die the smaller. Thus let's say you can invoke the emotion and roll a d12 and a d10. If the d12 is greater, you add that much to your success roll; but if the d10 is greater, you subtract it. (This makes emotion more volatile and less predictable--whatever it does, it will usually have significant impact.) Getting the numbers right would be tricky, though, as +d12 isn't a real impact on a d100 roll.

Anyway, those are some thoughts.

--M. J. Young

[Sydney Freedberg]

...in the game Hero Quest.... the problem solves itself in play as people activate these things when they feel that it's dramatic. Which automatically makes it so. In actual play this works brilliantly every single time. Seems simple, and solved to me.

Credit where credit is due, belatedly: Mike's interpretation of HeroQuest as "let the players invoke emotion when they wish and it'll inherently be dramatic" must've been rattling around in the back of my head when I discarded system-imposed emotions and proposed player-chosen gambling (i.e. literally and figuratively raising the stakes) instead.

Now I just have to figure out to make it work, surrounded as I am by the smouldering carcasses of my personal sacred cows. Keep the good ideas coming, people, and I'll keep stealin' 'em....