Damage Control: When Crime-Fighting Gets Messy (long)

[Bob the Fighter]

Hello!

I'm working on an RPG called Damage Control. The theme of the game is exploring personal responsibility and the repercussions of one's actions.  The mechanics support this by creating Consequences whenever PCs acheive less-than-total success in their actions.

Major thanks to the folks at Lumpley Games for the inspiration. That being said, on to the mechanics!

Characters exist in a contemporary world of vigilante crimefighters. The players don't have to portray such people, but they do exist.

Characters get three stats, called Limits: Hardship, Ruin, and Coldness. These stats combine to form a total, simply called Power. Limits (in order) indicate the character's self-sacrifice, her penchant for collateral damage, and her willingness to cross lines for the Greater Good.  Characters default to getting 8 dice to divide among the stats, with stats rated 1-5.

Whenever a Challenge comes along, it gets a Power rating. To defeat a Challenge, any/all charcters involved roll their Power ratings vs. the Power of the challenge. (Use d6's , 4+ means success) Figure out the effects of PC success/failure. Then roll. If they win, no sweat: just go ahead and narrate what happens. If they lose, they need to decide to either keep struggling or just let it go.

If they keep struggling, here's how it works: for each success they still need to beat the Challenge,  tick off one point from one Limit. These points grant automatic successes on the roll just made. For each point spent in this way, you get one Consequence point (CP). CPs can be spent  (by the players) one at a time for a significant, but not major, effects of the struggle on the plot, or they can be lumped together (max. lump of 3) to make big or huge effects occur.

When spending CPs, keep track of what Limit they came from. Hardship CPs cause PC injuries, equipment failure/loss, things that put the PCs through the wringer. Ruin CPs cause collateral damage, which can affect the Challenge itself, the surrounding environment, or innocent bystanders. Coldness CPs affect the *way* in which the PCs handle the situation: Coldness effects make the PCs' methods cut-throat, immoral, or downright evil. Even if you dump all the CPs into Ruin and have 'em just do damage to the Challenge, make sure that this still has an impact on the narrative.  

Keep a list of Consequences as they occur so you don't forget.

After rolling, spending CPs, and jotting things down, narrate what happened between the PCs and the Challenge, taking into account the CPs just spent.
When PCs attempt challenges that are well within their Power rating, things are nice and neat: no property damage, no injuries, and the heroes found a nice, clean way to handle the problem. This kind of Challenge should progressively give way to harder stuff as the story continues. When PCs tackle challenges at their Power rating or higher, things start to break down: they might walk away with injuries, collateral damage, civilian casualties, etc. Big blow-outs, with crumbled buildings, terrible injuries, and "just-following-orders" cruelty, arise from truly tough Challenges.

Players exert control over what Consequences they want to deal with at character creation: they can choose not to put points in Coldness, for example, if Captain Courageous will NEVER violate the Geneva Convention. The players should decide what parts of the game they want to explore.

My questions: is this too derivative of stuff from Lumpley Games? Does this look like fun? Could this work for something less bombastic than superheroes, like film noir or a Boondock Saints-style Premise?

[TonyLB]

I think you need a mechanic by which Consequences can become the next round of challenges.

Sure, Dark-Rat started off fighting the Jester.  But his next fight is with the police who want to bring him to trial for the Jester's death.

EDIT:  "Need" is too strong.  I think it would be a cool addition.

[Bob the Fighter]

Well, going along with that suggestion, why not have unused CPs (Consequence points) be the tool of the GM to keep the story going? The players choose what general kind of fallout comes from their actions, and it could be the GM's job to flesh that out.

This game could be a rolling ball: you figure out an initial premise to engage the players, introduce at least one protagonist (at this point, decide if you're doing a team of supers or if the PCs are distinct from one another), and, when it fits the plot, introduce a Challenge. The rating for this Challenge is important: an evenly matched PC and Challenge give 50/50 odds of creating CPs, so a Challenge with a couple points over the heroes will keep that ball rolling.

I'm also wondering about payoff: I think players should keep a running tally of how many Challenge points worth of obstacles they've trumped, but I'm not sure how to actually give payoff for them. Maybe I could figure out a chart to buy temporary and permanent Power points.

[MatrixGamer]

I'm interested to know what ways the characters have to deal with the consequences of their actions? What you described is a combat system - heavy on the role playing (which I like) but not a mechanism for them struggling with the TERRIBLE BURDEN of their TERRIBLE CRIME!!!

Oh the humanities!

Can you tell us how that will be handled?

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Bob the Fighter]

well, i've been retooling a lot since i posted this, and i think i'm going to go in more of a personal-consequences direction than what i've posted thus far.

i've been reading way too much joseph campbell and i'm working on a little Path of the Hero mechanic. there are two main stats, Power and Luck. under each of them, there are two sub-stats. for Power, they're Will and Awareness; for Luck, they're Fate and Chance. each pair of sub-stats exists in a balance, the combined value of the two being equal to their parent stat. thus, if you want to change one, you must also change the other to keep the balance going, unless you're changing the parent stat's value. Whenever you beat a conflict, the sub-stat that you drew on the most gets a point added to it (and thus its opposite loses one). The problem comes in when all the points in a given balance are in one stat: some fate befalls the character.

Will is your single-mindedness, your sense of self; it drives you to pursue personal agendas. Awareness is your sense of others, of the larger world around you; it opens you up to the rest of the universe, needs of the many, etc. Fate is your connection to the past and the larger world; it differs from Awareness in that it IS the connection, rather than being an awareness of it. Chance is the occurrence of pure randomness in your favor.

If you lose all your Awareness, you are too aloof and callous to be a hero anymore. Zero Will means that you are totally subsumed into others' agendas and lack self-motivation. Zero Chance means that you can no longer be the agent of change in the world around you; you become a mere mortal. Zero Fate means that you have no more connection to the world and the people around you; you disappear from mortal consciousness, forced to

My goal is to have players try and manage these four stats to maintain their Heroic Status. If you don't do so, it's okay; you just become a mortal, a lackey, a villain, or a myth. These don't lead to deprotagonization, per se; but they definitely lead to a change in the nature of the character.

DOES this lead to deprotagonization? Does this kind of shifting around look like fun?

[MatrixGamer]

The numbers track outcomes which is good because that lets players know how close to the edge they are. But what triggers changes in the stats is the meat of the game.

I can imagine your rules having lists of types of actions and their stat consequences. That educated the players and the GM at the same time. In a way it suggests to players how to play the game.

What I would find neat would be if fairly regular hero actions hurt their stats. So a hero can be ding everything right and in the end burn out. You'd need to give them ways to "save their souls" as well but have those have consequences as well. That way the point system created a counter balancing tension that is always moving during the course of a game.

Drama happens when things are moving but where they end up is in doubt.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[daMoose_Neo]

If you lose all your Awareness, you are too aloof and callous to be a hero anymore. Zero Will means that you are totally subsumed into others' agendas and lack self-motivation. Zero Chance means that you can no longer be the agent of change in the world around you; you become a mere mortal. Zero Fate means that you have no more connection to the world and the people around you; you disappear from mortal consciousness, forced to

...

DOES this lead to deprotagonization? Does this kind of shifting around look like fun?

Two words: Kingdom Come. If you're not familiar with it, dig it out! The consequences of that imbalance could lead to cool scenarios themselves, such as with Ross' Kingdom Come books - the first line, all I could think of was Supes goin balistic on the UN, too detached from his humanity to full understand what he was doing. KC was wicked in the way we got to see DC's heroes in their "golden" years.

Agreed- Deprotagonozation, I don't think so, but I do think someone who doesn't see the potential in using their character that way would think so. Ross' Superman is nothing like we think of the "Big blue boy scout" today, but for the story it was just so powerful. A lot of potential exists in a hero whos lost his humanity, a hero-turned-villian for whatever reason, you just have to have the players open to possibility.

[Bob the Fighter]

i've actually gotten a lot of changes and reworking done since i last posted. i wanted to make the two continuums something less fussy, so each pair of sub-stats is now a single stat that goes from zero to a maximum of its parent stat's rating.

the two parent stats, power and luck, are still here. instead of fate and chance, i have a stat called Shaping. instead of will and awareness, i have Questing.

Shaping is the urge to have a mortal life once more, to be a regular person instead of a hero; it increases whenever you form a strong bond with a mortal or a bond that's at least noteworthy with some mortal institution. when your Shaping becomes equal to your Luck (its parent stat), you become mortal. you can decrease your Shaping by severing some or all of your bonds to mortal culture.

Questing is a measure of a hero's character. When your Questing is equal to your Power (its parent stat), you are an utter altruist and become bound to the land you have sworn to protect. If [Questing < Power], the Hero lacks such an intimate connection. Zero Questing means a streak of selfishness a mile wide; it also  means that someone cannot be a Hero in the traditional sense. Selfless acts for the greater good increase your Questing, while significantly self-centered ones reduce it.

I think that this clears things up a bit, adding some streamlining; I'm also trying to make the system reasonably adaptable to any setting with a strong Heroism element. The "basic" setting is genre-straddling world-hopping, with Heroes called Keymasters (and [Questing=Power] ones called Gatekeepers) ; these Heroes have magic keys that let them travel from world to world, a la your favorite Planescape or Everway campaign.

The goalof these mechanics is totally about player choice: the choices the PCs make shape the physical and spiritual nature of the Heroes as well as their personalities. I think that this is what I was intending with my previous idea, but now it should be simpler to manage.

Hopefully I'll have some HTML on this game soon!