[Polaris] Conflict still sucks

[Ben Lehman]

Boy, it's been a while since I've started my own thread in this forum.  *cracks knuckles*

My game, Polaris is still in heavy development.  Playtesting has revealed some snags in the conflict system, which is what I want to talk about with you here.

Go http://ivanhoeunbound.com/020105.pdf">here and download the playtest draft (thanks, xiombarg).  Read it.  Get on the same page with me, which is about page 28.

So, right now, here are the problems with conflict resolution:
1) It is a little too slow, I think.  It breaks up the scene in a really unpleasant way.  Like, we play, then we break for 5-10 minutes to bid traits, then back to playing.
2) People tend to ignore what traits where bid when doing the narration.  I think this is because sometimes the Heart or the Ice Maiden bids traits, not towards a wide possible scene, but to a particular conclusion that they have in mind, and thus you get these nonsensical traits that you have to ignore.
3) The whole "winner and loser" thing isn't exactly working out how I want it to.
4) People ignore scale, mostly.  Most challenges are in the 4-6 range, anyway, at least for starting characters.  This is a problem.  I want a range of scales.

Here is what I like about conflict resolution as it is now:
1) It has a role for every player.
2) It has an unpredictable element, but yet allows you to shape and change it.
3) It allows you to push places that you wouldn't have in just free play.
4) It exhausts traits, which means that if you want to keep being effective in your conflicts, you need to either lose or do bad things (see Experience Checks.)
5) The scale mechanics, when they are working right, are really neat.

Here are the things that conflict resolution in Polaris must absolutely do:
1) Exhaust a limited pool of stuff.
2) Be exciting and tense.
3) Have some manner of both loss and success.

Here are things that are icing on the cake:
1) Role for every player.
2) Some way of tracking the effect on the outside world.
3) Some way that conflict is different for each player.  I'm not totally wedded to the traits system, mind you, but something like that.

So does anyone have any hints about how I might start down that road?

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben Lehman]

Also, you can download the game through the temporary TAO games site at www.tao-games.com

[Jonathan Walton]

Hey Ben,

First thoughts.

1) You have several ways that characters can change/lose/gain traits.  Personally, I find Counting Stakes not nearly as powerful or interesting as accepting what the Ice Maiden offers you.  If you can only grow as an individual by giving in to the evil of the demons, that says a lot about the game.

2) I still don't understand the mechanics for refreshing traits and whatnot.  It seems sorta Mind's Eye Theater inspired to me, and I don't really have any experience with that system.  During the playtesting, it looked like each character would commonly only have one or (maybe) two scenes in a given session, which makes exhausting traits more awkward than anything else.  If you have one big conflict where most of your traits get exhausted, then your choices for the next scene, if there is one, are crippled.  Is that intended?  Do traits get refreshed between sessions?

3) I still feel that, looking at the Temptations, the Knight is much less likely to be tempted by them if they've already rolled a victory.  The whole process seems less important then, unless the Temptations actually serve to make the story more interesting, even when the Knight's already succeeded.  Also, the masochist in me wants some Temptations that take a loss and turn it into a more interesting loss, instead of a re-roll or success.  Finally, when we played, it wasn't very often that a Knight would actually reject a Temptation, because these were things constructed by the other players precisely because this is what they wanted to have happen in the game, and rejecting it was like rejecting their input.  When your friends come bearing narrative gifts, you tend to accept them.  The rules make it sound like you're expecting more rejections than I think will actually occur.

4) In some ways, I think Polaris is fairly close to being the "abstract boardgame" equivilent for roleplaying.  This hit me as I was re-reading the Challange Value section.  I really wonder if the way attributes are brought into the game will actually lead to any kind of consistant characterization based on choices made at character creation.  I mean, does having a higher Light or Ice value really make that much difference in the outcome of rolls?  Do characters with different values really feel all that different?  Or is this just some way of calculating Challange Values, because there needs to be one that's based on something, not arbitrary?  Just something that struck me on this reading.

5) Just like in Dogs (and, say, Vesperteen), trait bidding makes all conflicts push towards importance really fast.  If there's any possible way that a trait makes sense in a given situation, there's a very good likelihood that it's going to get bid.  Remember the demon in the ice sculpture?  I very much doubt that low octane conflicts will happen at all.  And why would you really want them to?  With 1-2 conflicts per char per session, and most likely having one conflict at the core of every scene (at least, the way that we were playing it), you want these things to have teeth right?

More later.

[Ben Lehman]

Hey Ben,

First thoughts.

Thanks for them!

1) You have several ways that characters can change/lose/gain traits.  Personally, I find Counting Stakes not nearly as powerful or interesting as accepting what the Ice Maiden offers you.  If you can only grow as an individual by giving in to the evil of the demons, that says a lot about the game.

BL>  This is a pretty good idea, although it weakens Stakes yet again.

2) I still don't understand the mechanics for refreshing traits and whatnot.  It seems sorta Mind's Eye Theater inspired to me, and I don't really have any experience with that system.  During the playtesting, it looked like each character would commonly only have one or (maybe) two scenes in a given session, which makes exhausting traits more awkward than anything else.  If you have one big conflict where most of your traits get exhausted, then your choices for the next scene, if there is one, are crippled.  Is that intended?  Do traits get refreshed between sessions?

BL>  It's actually pretty different from Mind's Eye Theater, but let me see if I can give it a shot here.  I'm wanting to create a cycle wherein:

1) Traits are spent winning conflicts.
2) After a while, you run out of "thematic juice" from exhausted traits.
3) To refresh, you must roll an experience check.
4) To get an experience check, you must either lose a conflict or do something evil.  Further, it has a chance to push you further down the Zeal/Weariness path.

While I like the fact that the different types of traits keep you from doing the same type of conflict over and over again (just got in a fight?  have a social conflict.  Just had a social conflict?  get in a fight.), I am not wedded to traits being the "thematic juice" here or even keeping them in the system at all.  But it is terribly important that conflict should exhaust something that can only be regained by experience, otherwise the game breaks.

3) I still feel that, looking at the Temptations, the Knight is much less likely to be tempted by them if they've already rolled a victory.  The whole process seems less important then, unless the Temptations actually serve to make the story more interesting, even when the Knight's already succeeded.  Also, the masochist in me wants some Temptations that take a loss and turn it into a more interesting loss, instead of a re-roll or success.

The temptations are definitely do for an overhaul.  I think I should probably work on the main conflict system first, but since they are tied together, here are some changes that might be made to temptations:

1) Standardization.  Everyone has a trait gain, a trait change, an "SC Assist" and a "add color" temptation.  There is at most one restriction which is limited to being used with a win or a loss.

2) Divorce decisions from the Heart.  The Temptations in the system were originally designed as options which each player could use at any time (The Heart had the modern Courage and Cowardice, the Ice Maiden had a strange plot immunity for SCs thing, and the Moons had their add color abilities.)  I was thinking of generally giving everyone three or so options which could be used at various times.

3)  Generalization.  I'm still in doubt about this, but Eero thought it was a good idea, and I have great faith in him, which is to turn the temptation into a standard system that allows players to construct their own rewards.

 Finally, when we played, it wasn't very often that a Knight would actually reject a Temptation, because these were things constructed by the other players precisely because this is what they wanted to have happen in the game, and rejecting it was like rejecting their input.  When your friends come bearing narrative gifts, you tend to accept them.  The rules make it sound like you're expecting more rejections than I think will actually occur.

I don't think that this is a problem.  I can safely say that different groups do this differently.

For instance, in my FTF game, there was a great Ambition temptation for a "Valor" attribute in a combat scene.  The player turned it down.  That was narrative, right there.

4) In some ways, I think Polaris is fairly close to being the "abstract boardgame" equivilent for roleplaying.  This hit me as I was re-reading the Challange Value section.  I really wonder if the way attributes are brought into the game will actually lead to any kind of consistant characterization based on choices made at character creation.  I mean, does having a higher Light or Ice value really make that much difference in the outcome of rolls?  Do characters with different values really feel all that different?  Or is this just some way of calculating Challange Values, because there needs to be one that's based on something, not arbitrary?  Just something that struck me on this reading.

BL>  Knights with one high attributes will tend to try to steer challenges and traits towards that attribute, and the Ice Maiden will try to steer challenges towards the other attribute.  Balanced Knights are different, of course.

Is there a role-playing difference?  I don't know yet.

Is there a color difference?  Yes.

I am not totally wedded to keeping any attributes except Zeal/Weariness.

5) Just like in Dogs (and, say, Vesperteen), trait bidding makes all conflicts push towards importance really fast.  If there's any possible way that a trait makes sense in a given situation, there's a very good likelihood that it's going to get bid.  Remember the demon in the ice sculpture?  I very much doubt that low octane conflicts will happen at all.  And why would you really want them to?  With 1-2 conflicts per char per session, and most likely having one conflict at the core of every scene (at least, the way that we were playing it), you want these things to have teeth right?

BL>  I like having low-key, personal conflict which are about "does this man respect me?" or "can I make my wife not angry with me anymore?"  I want those in the game.

Now, Scale is presently tracking a wide variety of things.  Having "importance to character" and "importance to world" on the same track is not necessarily a good idea.

In fact... Traits can be subdivided along a second binary of Internal/External (Offices and Blessings are external, Fates and Attributes are internal.)  Wouldn't it be cool if these traits added importance on different scales?

But that's just more overhead in challenges, which is what I'm trying to get away from.

yrs--
--Ben

[Harlequin]

Blast.  Stupid browser ate a long and considered reply.  I hate that.

Hi, Ben.  I'll try and reenter my points.  Just read over the design, like it a lot, and have some thoughts on your questions about conflict.

The first is that I think maybe you have Trait bidding and Stakes setting in the wrong order.  Any bidding process with an advantage to last call tends to drive things up, up, up.  As you note this results in some odd behaviour and also in long bid phases.

Maybe you should consider putting the Stakes selection come first, and have this control the bidding segment somewhat.  For instance, perhaps a given Stakes level (row of your chart) sets not only the max Traits bid, but also a minimum.  If between you, you can't bid enough Traits to hit this minimum, then downgrade the Stakes automatically; it wasn't keyed well enough to the character.  Fine.  Reaching the max, on the other hand, serves a very important role: it signals stop bidding, already, and roll.  The lower the stakes, the sooner you want to be able to get this signal across.

(Offhand I would recommend a range of 0-2 for the first row on your chart, scaling up from there, with the second value always about double the first one.  Ish.  That's what my gut says, anyway.)

With regards to exhaustion, I have some bad experiences with MET and its derivatives when it comes to exhausting traits in a conflict.  For one thing it's not always the Heart who opens the scene, and anyone's contributions could (and should) drive the scene toward conflict.  Thus it's not necessarily up to the Heart to "go social" after exhausting his sword and Demon Lore, and it can cripple a story to force everyone to steer so completely clear of a conflict type.  (Two conflicts can draw on the same Traits, be both interesting, and be very different indeed.)  First edition MET had this problem in huge amounts - basically you could engage in only one good solid physical, one solid mental, etc. conflict per night, then you were done - regardless of later circumstances.  (There were mollifying factors but not enough of them.  It sucked.)

So I would definitely recommend that you pick some other engine to drive players along the thematic path you've laid out.  A variation on this scheme does seem like it would work well... just not one which kicks in this abruptly.  Two alternates which come to mind, both of which would start with the idea of writing Traits all on separate slips of paper...
1) A Trait invoked by the Heart gets handed to the Ice Maiden at the end, and vice versa.  You can only invoke a Trait you're holding.  The various Temptations and Refresh events basically redirect Traits to their "rightful" holders.  Passing 'bad' Traits back to the Ice Maiden makes a good cost to associate with some otherwise-beneficial Temptations.
2) A Trait invoked by the Heart gets handed to the Full Moon; a Trait invoked by the Full Moon (not possible under current rules, necessary here) passes to the Ice Maiden; she passes to the New Moon, and a Trait invoked by the New Moon is exhausted and set aside.  Perhaps the 'colour' Temptations pass Traits back to the Heart from the respective Moons (though this allows the Full Moon to "preempt" the Ice Maiden, probably not good).

Either of those might be a gain over what you've got now, I'd have to see them in action.

Vis Temptations, I'm pretty much opposed to all three of your "fixes" listed above.  Specificity rocks; I would say that Eero is smoking something.  The colour of your game is added to tremendously by limiting those options.  See The Mountain Witch's Fates, Sorcerer's descriptors.  Players who feel that they have a good enough handle on the game to modify it, will; those who don't, need specificity to help them get that handle.  Similarly, I think that the idiosyncratic and asymmetric distribution of effects is a great gain; the places (such as the two Moons' "helper" Temptations) where they are symmetric come across as a weakness, not a strength.  Were I you I would fight to individuate more, not less.

And as for having the Heart choose, I would say that your best course would be to keep this being the case... but to help distinguish between "That's not the direction I want the Heart to go" and "I don't value your contribution."  I'd say do this by making Temptations much more double-edged than they are now.  Let the tempter associate some colour with both sides of the choice, such that the Heart is choosing between two possible contributions by his friend, instead of yea-or-nay'ing someone's addition to the tale.

Hope that helps a little.

- Eric

[Ben Lehman]

Eric, thanks a bunch for your post.  That gave me serious food for thought.

I really like the idea of bidding a stakes cap.  That's a good idea.

I like the idea of bid traits passing back and forth between the Ice Maiden and the Heart, but I'm worried that then I wouldn't have the refresh carrot to tempt people into wanting experience checks (An advance result, mind you, is really more of a penalty.)  Generally speaking, I think that there needs to be some sort of substance that you get back from a refresh.  Any ideas on what it is?

I had an idea for a new way of rolling which I think might take some of the "must go last" pressure off of bidding.  The idea is a bit more complicated, like maybe this.

Each ranking in an attribute is keyed to a dice type, as such:
1: d4
2: d6
3: d8
4: d10
5: d12

When you bid a trait, you get one die of the appropriate type.  Bidding last, for the Heart, gives a Zeal die, bidding last for the Ice Maiden gives a Weariness die.  Possibly the Ice Maiden gets a bonus 2d6, or something, because as it is things are a little unbalanced.

Roll the dice, and compare them in some way.  What I'm thinking here is along these lines:

Line up your dice in order from highest to lowest.
Compare all dice.  Whomever has the most "victories" on these comparisons wins.
If somoene has more dice, simply discard the lower ones.

The cool thing about this is that you could tie the stakes and range of the challenge could be tied to the number of victories.  That way, whomever bid less traits effectively sets the possible scale for the victory.

What do people think about that, as a general rule?

yrs--
--Ben

P.S.  For what its worth, this hasn't eliminated the slowness, yet.

[Harlequin]

Hmm.  I think you have something good in making all traits contribute as they're being bid, though the die selection may be a problem (number of available d4's, for instance).  I can see where this isn't helping speed, though.

On the other hand, while clever, I think that the "throw out the lowest N dice of the guy with more dice" trick may be a red herring.  It simply gets you back to where the Stakes are emergent from the bidding process, rather than setting constraints on it.  It's a more elegant way to still not have a "quit bidding and roll already" signal.

As for a refresh carrot, how about combining that with another of your points above.  You say the Ice Maiden kind of needs a bonus to stay competitive; I can see how that would happen, yeah.  Maybe use that as your carrot?  Every time a conflict resolves, the Ice Maiden gets a cumulative 1d6 "ingathering sorrow" bonus to use on all subsequent conflicts involving this character.  A refresh event causes those dice to go away.

I should note again that this design is really, really cool and has inspired me to some neat stuff on one of my own games, which I'll show you as soon as it's ready to be seen.  Thanks!

- Eric

[Ben Lehman]

On the other hand, while clever, I think that the "throw out the lowest N dice of the guy with more dice" trick may be a red herring.  It simply gets you back to where the Stakes are emergent from the bidding process, rather than setting constraints on it.  It's a more elegant way to still not have a "quit bidding and roll already" signal.

BL>  Huh.  How can I put this?

First off, I still think having the stakes cap at the beginning of the challenge is cool, and it is totally compatible with the die pool thing.

But also, there is a really key thing that I forgot to write down.  If one player bids, and the other player doesn't respond, the first player can *keep bidding* and get a very large die pool.  Since the stakes are set by the lower bidder (sort of), that means that they don't need to worry about losing that particular roll.

yrs--
--Ben

[Harlequin]

I think then that I must not be following you.

My suggestion is that you set stakes before anybody ever bids a trait, so that the stakes can imply a bidding cap, which will serve the important function of cutting things to the chase during the bid phase.

I don't see how that's compatible with having the first player to stop bidding be setting the stakes in doing so.  Seems like if you use both, then he has just re-set the stakes.  Possibly this will always be lower than the first case, possibly not, depending on implementation... but it doesn't really make sense to me that this, too, is seen as the stakes-setting moment.

I'm not arguing... just confused.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Vis Temptations, I'm pretty much opposed to all three of your "fixes" listed above.  Specificity rocks; I would say that Eero is smoking something.

Now you went and did it. Now that I'm summoned here, let me throw in some totally irrelevant and irreneving crap. That's what you get by dealing with dark temptations.

First, I started by reading the thread about my own playtest. It reads like pretty fun, actually; I really should play more Polaris, although that's problematic, because there's this friggin' huge pile of games I "should" play. What I should do is to start playing five days a week.

But anyway, that playtest thread. I noticed that I have there a OMG HUGE depository of all kinds of cool Polaris ideas. While I was in the middle of the thread (around the place where Ron explains about vanilla nar vs. fairy tale) I started to think that I should really write my own version of the game just to get the diamond I'm seeing here. Just like with Vesperteen, if you've followed that adventure... It's tough to playtest and comment on other people's games, let me tell you: you end up falling in love with them.

I won't say it again in this post, but read that thread. Every one of my throw-away paragraphs has wonderful ideas, starting with character-disassociated traits and ending with temptations-as-biddable-items.

So, after that I continued by skimming the current playtest rules, to remind me what the rules exactly did. Ben: I fear that I've forgotten most of the rules (or rather, I've forgotten the creative thread behind the scenes), so I probably can't say anything totally relevant. Would you write some questions and such, to spark me? Agonize for me, man! The rules seemed about the same as before, by the by.

OK, time for my suggestions and contributions. As usual, don't mind my bossy style. A suggestion is only worthy when you believe in it, after all.

To quicken conflict resolution:
Remove the idea of a separate conflict resolution phase. Instead, bind scene starting and narration into the conflict resolution: while you narrate, you also bid. Then, when the time is right, the conflict is already defined. You don't have to stop the narration for the conflict resolution, because the resolution is being done in little bits during the narration.

For example, you could say that the player has to bid a suitable trait to wrest narration from the other player (I'm talking heart/FM here). The other player can listen to the proposed narration, after which he has three options:
1) take it and let the other party continue narration, as he seems to know where he's going.
2) bid a trait to take narration back; what was just narrated becomes true, but you get to say what happens next.
3) call for resolution, in which case dice are rolled and conflict resolved by the normal rules. No further bids allowed. The last narration doesn't step into force unless the player who narrated it wins the conflict. In any case, the winner will narrate how the scene ends; scenes will always end after the roll.

This has the added benefit of lightening the load of after-conflict narration: in the current rules an enormous amount of traits is bid, and the players are then forced to include them all into one huge narration, even if the traits do not fit. In this version, the trait narration is done when bid, so the conflict resolution only decides on the latest bit of narration.

Example: Heart starts the scene by bidding the trait "Knight Stellar". This means that his next narration has to somehow address that trait. (At this point the FM could counterbid to get another scene instead, but let's say that he won't.) The trait is marked, so that the players remember that it's part of the current bid. The Heart player narrates the scene until FM chooses to interfere, telling about a strategy meeting of the knights. Let's say that FM bids the trait "Political backstab", and suggests that one of the other knights will talk the Grandmaster into sending the Heart knight to defend a frontier outpost destined to fall. Now Heart can either take that suggestion and let FM continue the scene (into something even worse, possibly), or he can counterbid, in which case the FM contribution happens, but Heart continues narration, or he can call for the conflict roll (with the FM having bid last). If he calls for the conflict roll, the winner will get to narrate the scene ending. He won't need to include any other traits than the last one bid. The point: the only way Heart has to stop that backstab from happening as narrated by FM is to call for the roll, which will also force the scene to end. And he still might lose the roll...

To get people to respect the traits in narration:
The above suggestion helps in this too, because you have to justify the trait right away. I told you earlier what the problem here is: it should work so that the player bidding makes a claim "I can narrate all this.", but that doesn't work, because the last bidder doesn't necessarily narrate. Consider:

We've bid an enormous amount of stuff. I bid "Carebears". To get the system to function, you should have this mean that I have the responsibility of being able to narrate the carebears into the story. Then, if you want to continue bidding, you are also saying that you can narrate Carebears, but you can narrate this another thing, too.

Currently this doesn't work, because the other player might win the roll. So I bid Carebears, we roll, you win. Now you have to narrate the Carebears, while I was the one who claimed that they fit here. I should be responsible, when I was the one who took the carebears into the conflict in the first place. In addition, the temptations screw the narrator further still: the FM wins a roll, after which the Heart can pick a temptation that makes it impossible to narrate everything. The same principle: if I'm taking a temptation, I should be responsible for narrating it in, too.

Solutions: either lose the requirement of narrating everything in, or make the players responsible of their own claims. If I claim that Carebears can be narrated in here, make me prove it. I much prefer the latter: if you read that old playtest thread, you'll see that we liked the one-upmanship of "Hah, I bid this trait you couldn't believe! Care to try to narrate that, bitch?" You can remove that, though.

If you decide to keep the limitations induced by trait bidding, consider this: the winner is still the assumed narrator, but if he passes (cannot do it or doesn't want to), the last bidder has to narrate. If he cannot do it, there's a penalty (he claimed to be able to, by bidding still), and the other player gets to remove one trait/temptation from the narration (just means that he can disregard it in the telling, no mechanical effects), and then can try it. If he cannot still narrate it, he takes a penalty, too (he was the last to claim it could be narrated, before that last bid), and the turn goes back to the other player. This continues until one player manages to narrate it with all the bells and whistles.

How about the temptations? They make the system go haywire, because they cause limitations to the narration without making the Heart responsible. Consider this thing I offered in the playtest thread, which, I'm pretty sure, will correct many other problems as well: instead of the temptations being a separate phase, have the moons join the bidding: they can bid different temptations, and may even win the narration rights.

The "winner and loser" thing
Elaborate, man. I don't know what you're talking about.

Scale and ignoring it
I wrote about this pretty extensively in the playtest thread. Consider the first suggestion in this post, it'll fix this one, too (it's one of those great ideas, you know; don't bypass it without consideration). The options I offer in the playtest thread are still valid, as well; I especially love the idea of season-specific, role-specific matrix of scale tables that give so specific requirements that they cannot be disregarded. Fits well to strenghten the role of Setting as well...

Bids and probability of winning
As the rules stand, the last bidder will probably win the roll. That's somewhat problematic. It shouldn't be too hard to lessen the effect, and you probably have some solutions for that already.

In general, I think that the conflict system is pretty good as is. You shouldn't go dismantling it by adding those various die types and stuff (what happened to newbie-friendliness?). Make small, informed changes at this point, directed at specific problems.

Temptations
Could you cite where I'm saying that the temptations should be standardized and generalized (or is this some other Eero)? I've probably said it if you say so, but I can't for the life of me remember the context, the why of it. Wait... I vaguely remember writing something about having customizable temptations, but I can't remember why I thought that a great idea. There was something else there too... It was probably an outgrowth of some campaign level mechanic tinkering. Remember my campaign rules suggestions? Players should be allowed to shift between moon/FM roles, and the temptation sets each role has at their disposal should be changed as a kind of experience evolving thing, with different players in the same role holding different temptations... ah those were the times! Not really relevant right now, though...

But in general, I suspect the whole temptations-after-trait-bids thing. Consider seriously the idea of putting them in as biddable items, that'd make it cleaner. In the playtest I was most bothered by the analysis paralysis engendered by the other players choosing what to offer. That's dull for all players, really: the moons and FM feel that they should offer something to not short-chance the Heart, while the Heart will have to choose whether to take it, even when they're not interested in such additional brain-work. To make it worse, the conflict was already resolved, wasn't it? Why the f**k are we still at it, when the dice are already on the table!?! It's a subsystem that enslaves players rather easily.

The other option is to indeed make the temptation phase more interesting and dynamic by having more interesting and dynamic temptation choices. I favor the idea of giving the temptations either more room (in strength and crunch both), or removing the separate phase completely. In the former case your first priority should be the analysis paralysis, which really hampers enjoyable play. Make it so that the player doesn't always have to go through the rules, trying to pick which temptation he'll offer this time. That gets old really fast, and as all the temptations have their own rules, the player can't even memorize them.

Trait bidding and exhaustion
Play doesn't in my opinion carry out any of these martial/social polarization theories. When we played, there was a constant influx and outflux of renewed traits from temptations, and the bids weren't delineated in those terms to begin with. The rules don't force you to answer a violent trait with another violent trait, after all. In practice the game plays best when the players simply don't consider it like that. At least for us it was natural, and virtually all conflicts were social, psychological and martial at the same time. So my advice is to disregard everything said thus far about MET trait systems.

As for what Jonathan said about this: getting limited in traits by exhaustion is the point, I feel. After a big conflict you might want to reneve the traits just to make sure that you have the necessary traits in the next conflict. Unless the other party is even more tapped out, and you want to keep the next conflict small... it's all strategic, and I see no problem in being tapped out. Actually, now that I think about it, I really like the inbuilt narrative control, the cyclical nature of tapping out and renewing...


OK, that's that for now. Redefine and refine your questions, and by Odin, get rid of that stupid die pool mechanic before I bash your head in! The game doesn't get better by adding stuff at this point, when the conflict mechanic is nearly overburdened to begin with. Stick with one die, I say. Roll it multiple times through the temptations, if you want to.

On a lighter note, I have an unrelated idea that'll make this the best game of the decade:

Polaris: the card game

Traits are cards. Temptations are cards. Heck, make it a collectable card game for all I care. When you gain traits, you get more cards, each specifying the particular trait (with it's possible special rules). Unactivated traits are kept in a hand of cards (common between the Heart and FM). When you activate, your opposing number takes the trait card on the table in front of him. When you've both activated, the card is put aside, until you get to refresh it.

Temptations are cards, too. When you offer one, you get a new one. Each temptation card has the rules for that particular temptation.

In a conflict bid all bid traits, temptations (remember my suggestion about that) and possible other cards (heck, you can put stake effects in cards too, while at it) are piled together until the bidders dare not add any more. Then the narrator narrates, taking the cards in hand, and he discards those conflict cards one by one when his narration touches the point in a card. The narration ends with the conflict pile is emptied.

Advantages: a fucking brilliant solution to all bookkeeping, pace and narration problems you've ever complained about. You can have all those special rules for temptations and traits (I still love the Musician trait) in those cards. Add a mechanic for drawing and playing cards, and you get all the beautiful limitations a card game has: want to offer a temptation that gains a particular trait? Better draw that trait from the deck, first. To top it all, the rules are practically built for this solution: there's practically no changes at all to make, it's all just a new way to track all these bothersome traits, stakes and temptations. The setting gets to the game concretely in the form of the cards (abstraction has always been a problem in Polaris, if you remember).

Disadvantages: It's not easy to make a card game. It's somewhat difficult to print, too. And sell. There is the expertice for that available, though, so try it before dismissing. Make it a stand-alone first to test it out.


I hope all this was helpful. I should be working on my game for Gary Pratt, and here I am chatting about Polaris... Anyway, define and redefine those problems, so we get to attack them again from a different viewpoint. Polaris seems to be somewhat stuck right now, so you need to grab it and shake hard!

[Ben Lehman]

Eero -- thank you.  I'm digesting the post, this is just to say that I'm not ignoring it.  More response in a few days.

yrs--
--Ben