[No Game} A Floating Rule

[knicknevin]

I've read a few threads about games where the players not taking part in an action get to decide whether the player taking the action succeeds or nor, or at least they get to decide on the quality of the acting player's success, but something about that bothers me, since it depends on players not simply going all out to 'win' by voting down any other player's attempt to advance themselves. This isn't so much a problem between a regular group who are all on the same side, but what about one off games or games where the PCs have conflicting goals?

Reading one of those threads, I came up with this idea: give each player a set of Yes & No tokens at the start of the game, say 3 of each, plus a Maybe token. When the player's have to vote on another player's action, they put one token from their set face down in the acting player's 'result pool'.

Once each player has played a token, they turn them all over: if they got mostly Yes, they succeed, but if it was mostly No, they fail; Maybe tokens do not count to either side and in a tie, the player succeeds unless they were doing soemthing incredibly hard, in which case they fail.

The acting player then takes one token of the majority type from those played, e.g. if they succeeded, then they take a Yes token; they add the token they take to their own set. All other tokens have been spent and are removed from the game for now; a player only gets a full set of replacement tokens if they have just one left in their set after any vote.

In this way, players really have to think about their choices: they can't just keep voting No to try to mess up the other players, so it is in their interest to keep their No votes for when it really counts. Equally, voting Yes for someone means that they have an additional Yes vote to use, which they may have to use before they can get a fresh set; equally, voting No against someone gives them an addition No token they can use against you!

Feedback?

[mutex]

It's interesting, and because of the "decay", it could work well.
One issue I can imagine in actual play is that when someone gets their pool refreshed, would they go back to the default, or would it be <the token they have left> + yes +yes + maybe + no?

[Vaxalon]

There's a bunch of ways to refresh the tokens.  You could have them get some predetermined group (YMN, YYMNN...) or refresh them up to the starting array.

...or the discarded tokens drawn from at random.

What happens when you have two PC's contending with each other?

[knicknevin]

One issue I can imagine in actual play is that when someone gets their pool refreshed, would they go back to the default, or would it be <the token they have left> + yes +yes + maybe + no?

I think that, when you get down to just one token, you get refreshed with a full set, so you end up with the same set you began with; a quick thought experiment with other models indicated to me that you might get recursive problems, e.g. if the token you have left is included/excluded in the tokens you draw when refreshing, then after a few iterations of that process you could easily end up with all Yes or all No tokens. Even putting that aside, if the token you had left affected the tokens you drew when refreshing, then your votes during one phase of the game would have an influence on the next phase: if you want to increase the tactical element of the game, you could go this route, but I think the model as proposed is sufficiently complex for most gamers.

What happens when you have two PC's contending with each other?

Do you mean 2 PCs in conflict, e.g. one trying to target the other, who is actively resisting the attempt? In that case, set one side to Yes and the other side to No, e.g. if you want Player A to succeed, vote Yes, but if you want Player B to succeed, vote No. The players in the conflict would vote... which adds an interesting twist if you vote against yourself; say you vote Yes in favour of your opponent, you are in effect saying that you want to get rid of one of your Yes votes and make your opponent pick one up... if you know the other players well and your strategy runs deep, I can easily see this being more beneficial to your PC over the whole course of the game, rather than taking the immediate advantage offered.

[Callan S.]

Hi knicknevin,

I've read a few threads about games where the players not taking part in an action get to decide whether the player taking the action succeeds or nor, or at least they get to decide on the quality of the acting player's success, but something about that bothers me, since it depends on players not simply going all out to 'win' by voting down any other player's attempt to advance themselves.

I think there are two approaches a player can take with voting about these things. One is to go all out for the win. The other is to be the master training the apprentice. The master can beat the apprentice easily, of course. But he holds back that ability, only pressuring the apprentice so as to train him and make him stronger.

I get the feeling that your trying to have mechanics that would change an 'all out for the win' player into a 'master and apprentice' player, by making them really think about their vote and somehow controlling how they think about it as you make them think. How close am I?

[knicknevin]

I think there are two approaches a player can take with voting about these things. One is to go all out for the win. The other is to be the master training the apprentice. The master can beat the apprentice easily, of course. But he holds back that ability, only pressuring the apprentice so as to train him and make him stronger.

There is also 'audience appreciation' voting, i.e. you vote in favour of something if you felt the player taking the action really made an effort or if it just amused you, but you vote against if you found it dull, unimaginative, pedestrian, etc. There is an element of 'master training apprentice' here, in that the players collectively 'teach' one another (and learn from one another) the level of detail/effort/humour/entertainment they want to see put into narrative actions.

I get the feeling that your trying to have mechanics that would change an 'all out for the win' player into a 'master and apprentice' player, by making them really think about their vote and somehow controlling how they think about it as you make them think. How close am I?

Well, I don't know about changing players over the long term (I prefer the aversion therapy suggested in The Munchkin's Guide to Power Gaming involving hitting players when they make the wrong choice!) but in the short term, I think this would encourage players to be less about 'screw everyone else' and more about 'how does this advance the story?'

I suggested it because the game concepts I had read had competitive set-ups (e.g. Player 1 suggests a challenge, then Player 2 has to narrate their way around it) but expected co-eperative, objective play (e.g. after suggesting the challenge, Player 1 then contributes to the decision as to whether Player 2 succeeded or not) In a group who know each other well, or come to do so over the course of many sessions of the game, this would not be so much of a problem, but in one-offs (which a number of games of this type seem to be) there would be little incentive to reward other player's ingenuity. It bugged me, so I thought of this as one way of addressing the issue constructively and objectively.