Torchbearer Sucks, and Starting Over

[Shreyas Sampat]

So, some of you may know that I have long ago worked on a game called Torchbearer, whose intent was to be a game of sparkling, elegant, energetic mythology.

It never got there, because it was entrenched in the wrong assumptions; it was much too concerned with the trappings of mythology, but never supported the bones of story underneath. Who wants that? I don't.

So, here's a rethinking of the game. What do we know about mythology?

[*]Mythological characters have identifiable traits.[*]These traits are not unimportant.[*]These traits can change significantly over time.[*]Internal to a mythology, events tend to occur in repeating patterns.[/list:u]Anyway, that's great, but who has the time to tell fifteen thousand stories that assemble a mythology? I don't! So Torchbearer is about telling an epic. So, in each epic there are a bunch of characters.

What I Know Right Now[list=1][*]Each character has some Problem. This is a Problem in a technical sense; it means "the central conflict that drives that character's story," and not anything less or else. A Problem has a pre-determined numerical value that indicates how much effort it will take to resolve.[*]Further, he has some Traits. These are features that the character displays when he deals with problems. They can be very internal and straightforward, like Casually Excessive Force for Hercules, or much less direct, like Food for Hansel and Gretel (they make a breadcrumb trail, find a candy house, bake a witch...).[*]When you work to solve a Problem, it doesn't have any numerical benefit unless your action was expressive of one of your Traits. If it is, then the character gets some Resource.[*]Resource does some things:

[*]You can spend it to create an Obstacle for another character. Let's say 1 Resource = 1 unit of Obstacle importance.[*]You can spend it at the instant you gain it, to deal with an Obstacle.[*]Less efficiently than for other characters, you can create an Obstacle for yourself. 2-for-1.[*]You might be able to increase the importance of a Problem or Obstacle.[*]An Obstacle is something between a Problem and a Trait; it's a little fact about a character, with story structure wrapped up in it. It's got its own numerical rating or importance. In neo-TB, there may be Obstacle templates which you can use to construct mythologies, by choosing a set; these would be things like Test of Three Trials, The Heroes' Journey, GARGARGAR...I think that I can argue for nested Obstacle structure here, too, but that might be flying off into the realm of too-abstract.[*]Obstacles always reflect their originator. Khalilia Butterfly-in-Amber gives you a knife, you write it down as "Khalilia Butterfly-in-Amber's Knife."[*]You know that saying, if there's a gun on the mantel in the first act, it must go off in the third? An Obstacle starts out as a gun; the event that tells you, "This is the start of a subplot."[*]An Obstacle causes trouble for you and gets in the way of you solving your Problem. Khalilia's knife might, like, be being hunted by Zahara Croft, Antiquities Poacher, the famous archaeologist/swimsuit model.[*]But it's also a way of dealing with other Obstacles; you can totally stab Antiquities Poacher with the knife.[*]Every time you express an Obstacle by getting in trouble for it or by using it to your advantage, put a chip on it. When the number of chips equals or exceeds its numerical rating, you have a Crisis.[/list:u][*]A Crisis determines what happens to the narrative force of your Obstacle as it resolves.

[*]The first possible result is that you feed its chips into resolving your Problem. This causes a permanent alteration to your character; the Obstacle turns into a Trait.[*]Or you can feed it into another Obstacle, that affects another person; the consequences of your story spill over into someone else's story.[*]So, hm, maybe this is how you alter the importance of Obstacles and Problems, too; you can feed your Resource into preexisting issues.[*]Finally, you can feed it into a new Obstacle for you; this depletes some of the Obstacles energy, perhaps reducing it by half.[/list:u][*]If you're cool, you can fuse multiple Obstacles together when they are depleted, and have a single Crisis to determine the fate of their narrative force[/list:o]What I Don't Know
[list=1][*]I don't know how characters and other narration responsibilities are apportioned between players. Here are some thoughts: Maybe each character gets introduced by his owner, who frames a little scene showing the character and his Problem, and trying to express Traits so as to gather Resource. After the introductions, you can only call for a scene with another player's character; either you are awarding them a new Obstacle, or framing a scene where an Obstacle you awarded causes problems.[*]I don't know what qualifies as expressive of a Trait or Obstacle.[*]I don't know how the Crisis process decides what result you get when a Crisis occurs. A part of me wants to take this out of the players' hands.[/list:o]So, to conclude, that's my design document so far. I want this game to create play that results in the four features I enumerated above, and I want play to be strongly collaborative. There should be no point where a player isn't able to have some input and ongoing investment. Am I succeeding in doing that with this design? What's missing? What's preventing me from deriving these effects?

[Mike Holmes]

So, players only control characters with Problems? Perhaps they could control more characters, and only have certain ones attain certain plot significance if/when a scene in which their problem is introduced is performed? That way you don't have to kick a character right off with a problem and it can evolve more organically?

Mike

[Shreyas Sampat]

So, players only control characters with Problems? Perhaps they could control more characters, and only have certain ones attain certain plot significance if/when a scene in which their problem is introduced is performed? That way you don't have to kick a character right off with a problem and it can evolve more organically?

Interesting question, Mike; I was struggling with this earlier today.

My thought is that it's possible to control a character who doesn't have a Problem, but that character doesn't have any of his own narrative force; he's a Trait or Obstacle associated with a "real", Problematic character.

I think that your strategy of back-forming Problems in play could work with this in mind; you don't need to predefine which characters will end up being epic and which won't, if you prefer to start with a web of characters and see what happens to them. Rather, you can just say, "Oh, this character is an Obstacle of importance 3," and then you bumble around a while until he maneuvers into opposition with some other character.

The reason that I didn't suggest this strategy in my prior post is that it's pretty much the opposite of the way I prefer to handle things; generally, I am reluctant to introduce a character unless I know why he is important and interesting, and this is what a Problem should tell you.

[Mike Holmes]

The reason that I didn't suggest this strategy in my prior post is that it's pretty much the opposite of the way I prefer to handle things; generally, I am reluctant to introduce a character unless I know why he is important and interesting, and this is what a Problem should tell you.

Which makes sense for protagonists. But for non-protagonists, you need to have these too. I think that if people have access to make characters as needed as traits and obstacles, that, basically, these can become characters at any time a player decides that they've discovered the character's problem and can show it in a scene.

Or is that still problematic?

Mike

[Shreyas Sampat]

No, that makes all kinds of sense. You're suggesting, if I understand you, that you can promote a character-who-is-a-trait into a Character in his own right? That's a really good idea. I love that.

I think that this is not only possible but necessary; this is a very simple operation, I think. Depending on how important you want it to be, you just increase its magnitude.

I think, tangentially, this leads into a point about similarity; Problems are just Obstacles on a larger scale, so it's possible for Obstacles to have their own internal structure. These, I think, are the tools you use to build folklores with repeating structural motifs:

Obstacle: Ordeal of Three Gifts
Importance 3
Begins: Someone gives the protagonist three gifts.
Episodes: Each gift is needed and discarded to solve a single, specific problem.

Variations: Each gift is an Obstacle with its own importance that needs to be resolved, before it is discarded by resolving the Ordeal's episodes

Once you have a collection of these, you can reuse them to build a series of stories that feel similar. The recursion trick is particularly cool and useful if you're in an Orientalist mood and want to tell the kind of stories-within-stories that appear in the Arabian Nights, where the internal stories take on more importance than the frame story.

[Mike Holmes]

Wow, sounds cool.

Somebody else dive in here! Torchbearer has a ton of potential, I think, with this revision.

Mike

[Stefan / 1of3]

Very nice idea.

The recursion trick is particularly cool and useful if you're in an Orientalist mood and want to tell the kind of stories-within-stories that appear in the Arabian Nights, where the internal stories take on more importance than the frame story.

That's also very common in Greek and Roman poetry. Try Ovid's Metamorphoses.

You could even make this a mechanic. Player's could add facts through short stories-within-stories.

[Jason E Leigh]

Ya know, every time I go away from this place for a while to work on my own design, I come back here and find someone else is already trodding all over the ground I'm walking.

Damn you, Shreyas! ;-)

I think you're going to have resource-economy issues.  Trust, me, I know.

Testing the current incarnation of my game-design-that-will-not-die (working title), I have a structure very much like this.

Characters have Drives (problems) with numeric values that indicate their current level of resolvedness.  They have traits.  They go into scenes to try and push their Drives toward resolution.  I'm using a combination FitM structure with some Karma-After-the-Fortune-but-Still-in-the-Middle resource manipulation (KAtFbSitM?).

Anyway, the problem is that the currency structure (1 unit of resource = what in terms of trait value, what in terms of Problem value, what in terms of Obstacle value) needs to be crystal clear, and better if it's 1 to 1 to 1.

Also, how and where (specifically) the resource is gained and lost is going to be key.

I'll watch with interest.

cheers,


Jason

[DevP]

First, aesthetically, see how close to pure recursion you can do. I'm not one to suggest winding up your game designs in to perfect little balls of thought and such, but for some designs - Universalis and Torchbearer strike me - it's worth while. You've already found that (1) Characters are promoted traits/obstacles, (2) Obstacles can be nested, and (3) Problems may just be a kind of Obstacle. So you're mostly there.

You say you want strongly collaborative play. Do you still want a GM/players split, or do you want the players to pick up the slack for handling various NPCs?

As for what qualifies for a Trait or Obstacle: how about the player who originated the Trait or Obstacle? That is, a character can be tagged with such elements, but the character could effectively veto the ones she doesn't want, playing online into those she seems interesting (and thus being rewarded by the owner for doing so).

As for how to determine what path a Crisis takes: there's always a random approach; what do you seek beyond randomness?

[Ben Lehman]

I want to know what's up with the GM, by which I mean:
1) Person responsible for grooming the world.
2) Person responsible for generation conflict/situation.
3) Person responsible for saying no.

yrs--
--Ben

[Bob the Fighter]

er, scratch all that. i got my Polaris and Torchbearer topics all messed up.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Bob, I fail to understand how that pertains to Torchbearer. Can you explain?

[Bob the Fighter]

well, how about this:
even though i got my games confused :) i was thinking about what Dev and Ben were asking, with regard to how to handle conflict creation/maintenance and other "GM's responsibility" jobs.

i think that you can handle a lack of a GM if you determine beforehand what the overarching conflict or event is, and also decide on an outcome. this channels some Vincent Baker (of COURSE the PCs win!) and it also draws on other media (like movies). the point of play, then, is to elaborate on the details and explore various foibles of the larger conflict.

um, i think this is more relevant.