[GroupDesign] - Nailing Mechanics

[Sydney Freedberg]

Doug, thanks for your thoughts.

I think I'll actually take on the mantle. So, as Acting Foot ("my left foot"?), I''ll give everyone a few more hours to make suggestions as to additional topics that might be required. Assuming no radical new ideas emerge, after work today I will start two new threads on "Advanced Archivism" and "Make Your Own Metagame" as outlined above and seconded by Doug.

And if things slow down for a few days while Tobias and I are both travelling, well, we've had slow patches before, and the project will survive. It's a natural (iterative!) rhythm. Yeah.

[Andrew Morris]

Okay, I'm unbelievably busy at the moment, but I don't want to "Fade Out" from this project, so here's my first comment on the proposed mechanics. (By the way, I think this is a great foundation, and I'd much rather hone this one than worry about creating a whole new set of mechanics.)

I don't like the choose-your-own style traits, and I'll explain why.  It feels unfinished and unbalanced to me. I'm all for players having freedom when creating characters, but I think there should be at least a core list of traits, so that players can get a feel for what a "trait" looks like. With having players just come up with their own, you might have one player who takes "Unarmed Combat:1" and another who takes "Soldier:2." The first player is kinda shafted by their own choice, because their choice is a subset of the second player's choice.

If we're going this route, I think we absolutely need (at least) a well-defined set of rules/parameters for creating traits.

That's just the first things that pops into my mind when I look over the mechanics we have, but I'll try to give some more detailed opinions/ideas in the next few days.

[Sydney Freedberg]

I don't like the choose-your-own style traits....It feels ...unbalanced to me.... you might have one player who takes "Unarmed Combat:1" and another who takes "Soldier:2." The first player is kinda shafted by their own choice, because their choice is a subset of the second player's choice.

Actually that is the problem I've always had with freeform traits too (it's part of what turned me off Story Engine ) and you're right that more definition is probably necessary to allow for some kind of rough equivalence -- either that, or give characters with a narrower trait some kind of bonus when in their area of speciality.

EDIT: On the other hand, I like the approach of "write down X things about this person you've just made up" and only then getting people into the mechanics. That said, the chargen process can then (iteratively!) refine the initial freeform jottings against a more rigorous template of what Traits can be.

[Doug Ruff]

Agreed that this is a problem with freeform traits, but if you use a "re-roll" mechanic like Fate does with Aspects, you can still retain a reasonable balance.

If you haven't read Fate: Aspects provide one re-roll for each "point" in the Aspect (this is a simplification, by the way, but it's this use of Aspects I want to illustrate). So a "broad" Aspect has more opportunities to be used, but you will only get the same number of re-rolls.

Fate also has a Skills system, where the Skills are predefined for each setting. I think there's a lot we can steal.... sorry, learn from this game in terms of dealing with "free-form" abilities.

And I'm not comfortable enough with the suggested mechanics yet to want to commit to them absolutely - if it's alright with everyone else, I'd like to explore the two suggested threads first, and then come back to this - I think it would be useful to look again at them in the light of what we discover over the next few days.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Interesting about FATE. I've read it once but don't recall it that well, so your tips are welcome.

I'm not comfortable enough with the suggested mechanics yet to want to commit to them absolutely - if it's alright with everyone else, I'd like to explore the two suggested threads first, and then come back to this.

I'm totally with you, and I wrote most of these mechanics.

I propose that we take the mechanics roughed out in this thread (let's call it "v0.1") as the baseline for discussion -- not seeking to refine them, but seeking rather to break them. That is, rather than try to tweak v0.1 to cover new concepts as we come up with them, we should systematically explore what things we want this game to do that the current draft mechanics cannot handle, poke a bunch of holes in said mechanics, and then, when they are shot to hell, salvage what we can from the wreckage and start over with a clean slate in a new thread. The resulting second draft ("v0.2"?) may look a lot like v0.1 or it may look very different indeed.

And in a little bit I'll spawn the new threads, so -- as Acting (Left) Foot -- let's wrap this thread up (I believe Andrew has some specific reactions to the draft mechanics, so I won't close it yet) and move the discussion on over.