[Material World] Ronnies feedback

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

This entry begins with a fantastic basic context, but halfway through it spins into Shadowrun ops for standard RPG goombahs, rather than corporate, conspiratorial villainy among a self-defined, arrogant elite. For example, the second half of the text seems to apply to the NPCs called "super mooks" instead of to the player-characters, designated Us.

Now for the chart part. Unfortunately, although it's a hell of a neat idea and the possibilities for what companies are linked to which others (and the implications) are endless, the actual usage of it during play seems like a monumental pain in the ass. The GM just continually adds and subtracts points and moves the little whatnots around on the chart? Round by round, world without end? The connection between all that work and what's happening in play seems tenuous at best.

When the text moves into discussing playing the characters, it loses me completely. Play seems like a complete GM/player disconnect - the players get to rave and interrupt, and "get into it," but the GM sets stuff up and runs with it looking for maximal jazz-moments to ramp up, with a full hand for tossing in logjams, setting up hoops, and opening up doors they "can" go through (but have to).

Among the players, are they competing? I'm very unclear about that, because if it goes by the first part of the game, where each character is Us, they seem like badasses whose petty rivalries, bets, and occasional murderous flashes of vengeance or power-grabbing would shake the world, or at least the immediate economy. But then, goig by the second part of the game, it seems like the company stuff is all GM, and the characters are just a "team" of some kind associated with a single company or consortium, who run around doing this-and-that in a kind of Ghostbusters way.

How do rounds relate to scenes?

I do like the Action Point resolution quite a bit, because it offers an interesting and I think fun form of the shouting/jostling that does characterize the typical Shadowrun clusterfuck. However, I think the system badly needs to reverse the AP costs of Cool Stuff - really, think about it for a sec, you'll see.

A couple of little bits I like too ...

1. Your comments on the areas of conflicts and the logistics of what-is-where remind me of the excellent game Extreme Vengeance, which is good.
2. Cool Stuff is very, very well defined and strikes me as a go-to example to send people to when they get all hung up about what a character "can" have, when designing their games.

Overall, my take is that this text is full of inspiring bits and pieces, with some neat mechanics and resolution ideas, but as a game, it's not yet ready. Joe, I'd be interested in your current thoughts on retooling it, and you can count me in for reading the next version.

Best,
Ron

[Joe Zeutenhorst]

Hey Ron,

Thanks for the feedback. I'm still not sure what's going to happen with this thing, but if anyone has any ideas, lay them on me. About some of the issues brought up here...

GM/Player disconnect:

I guess what you're saying is right, but I'm not sure what to do about it. It's exactly the way I ran Shadowrun, many years ago, which is probably the problem. I would develop a "fault line," where tensions are building up and something has to change, dump the players in, and from there, everything is off the cuff. The "fault line" gets a little prep. Some characters, some place descriptions, events, but none of them will for sure get into play.
That's how I imagined running this one, too. The GM (me, lets just come out and say it) just makes shit up as fast as he can. Unlike SR, though, nothing too bad can happen if you mess up. Since "a guy with a rifle" just has the stats for the rifle, you can toss in whatever NPCs you want, and just refer to the regular stuff section as to what they can do. Mooks are either up and functioning or killed, knocked out, dazzled or fooled. Players can escape overly deadly situations really easily, as long as they haven't taken a third wound.

Player Competition:

The way I wrote it, players are definitely not competing. Any conflict between PCs that uses Cool Stuff will just go the player who acts first, and that doesn't seem very compelling. Conflict at the economic scale is certainly possible, but that goes back to my main problem at the moment, the market/brainshare chart. It's just something I haven't really thought about (oops). Perfect cooperation just isn't in the spirit of materialistic elitist assholes that I'm trying to invoke here.

How Rounds Relate to Scenes:

Rounds are just what scenes are made up of. I think I need a word other than 'scene', though. It's got definition creep in the text. You're not supposed to use rounds to play out a scene where you get new Cool Stuff, for example. Anytime you do something "tactical", you're supposed to use the Action Point round thing.

Reversing the AP Cost on Good and Ideal Uses:

Okay, I'm thinking... but... I've got nothing. I made the Ideal For cost one less AP than Good For because it's the only way I could think of to make it more desirable mechanically. No matter. I don't think there is any reason to use the current three state system over just a list of things the Cool Stuff does, all of which is either passive disadvantages or active things it can do for the character, which cost 3 AP.

The Chart and How It Connects to Play:

The chart should be the context for what the players are doing. Ever play X-Com? You look at this big picture of the globe, and little notices pop up. There's a UFO sighted in Argentina, there's a terror site in Japan, there's an alien base in Antarctica, and then time stops and the game waits for a response. The response is invariably "Send our guys over there to shoot aliens," but part of the fun is deciding what's priority and making up a strategy to achieve the goal.

That's what I want the chart to be. It's the "Strategic" view. The players look at it and decide what needs doing. They make up crazy plans to move the brainshare around. They go to the Kremlin, or whatever, and that's the "Tactical" view. Then, the players get to use all the cool stuff that they made up. Those are the fun things I'm trying to suggest people do.

What am I going to do about the chart? I have no idea. It seemed simple when I wrote it. When I read it the next day, it looked like the type of thing I look at in other people's games and say, "Errrrr..."

I want a way to create a system of interconnected nodes. I want to have some shifting built in, to give the impression that the system would go on without player intervention, but the whole thing needs to be a zero sum game. I want the players to be able to change it once piece at a time to achieve their goals and also have more than one way to go about achieving that goal.

Current thoughts on replacement system:
1.   Instead of the current system, each Brand gets three states in each market: gaining, holding, losing. To go up the ladder, somebody else must go down. Perhaps ditch 'Brainshare' entirely.
2.   Advantages/disadvantages like the current system, but brainshare only moves when the ads/disads are changed, instead of every scene.
3.   Make each player responsible for a circle. Keep the system otherwise like it is, hoping that distributing the job makes things better instead of worse.

That is, if Material World gets a revision, which at this point, I'm not quite sure is happening. I like some of my ideas here (knocking brainshare around, stuck time, no-trait no-skill characters), but the game seems way too... fragmented, maybe. I'm thinking it may reincarnate as some add-on rules, setting and color for some other RPG, like FUDGE or Savage Worlds. HeroQuest might be good too... it would throw the satiric element I'm trying to convey here into better relief, with characters taking relationships to brands, companies, catchphrases, their car, etc, and also moving to a Conflict Resolution system would support the "petty rivalries, bets, and occasional murderous flashes of vengeance" thing a lot better. Damn, the more I think about it the more I like the idea.

[Sydney Freedberg]

A brilliant throw-away thing in the current draft that leapt screaming into my brain, burning with as-yet untapped potential, was your mention that

(1) cool stuff can be anything, i.e. Madonna's phone number being as powerful as a weapon -- I'd love more examples of the non-weapon ones, which would be a tremendous source of setting-related color, even if you do port the system itself over to HeroQuest (which, yeah, could do the "anything is an ability" thing very nicely)

(2) cool stuff has to come from somewhere. This is huge, you do realize that? Cool stuff & its acquisition are a huge gamer fetish, but here you have the potential to tap that energy for not merely "okay, you go to the black market gun guy and spend 4000 creds, now you have a smartgun" but for "okay, your ex-girlfriend is dating this guy who works at the club where Madonna was totally making out with this guy who..." and so on, ad infinitum.

And yes, HeroQuest relationships are fun, but they don't necessarily tag "my cool stuff" to "this whole web of people" in the same way. If you run with (1) + (2), then shopping for equipment becomes drawing a relationship map, just by who the players decide their characters get Cool Stuff from. And then, of course, the GM (or whoever) can tie those relationships into all sorts of corporate and interpersonal conflicts, pulling each character in different directions to protect or acquire more Cool Stuff -- which should be not just character-bait but player-bait as well, of course, since gamers love getting their characters more toys.

I'm raving a little bit with excitement + cold medicine + I really should be working on my 4,000-word article due Friday, but I think this all works perfectly with the idea of the Brand -- that what matters about your stuff is not the physical thing itself and what it can do, but all its social associations. Everything the characters have (that's significant enough to write down on a character sheet, that is) could be throbbing with relationships and potential conflicts, from their shoes to their weapons to the phone numbers programmed into their oversize 80s cellphones.

[Joe Zeutenhorst]

And yes, HeroQuest relationships are fun, but they don't necessarily tag "my cool stuff" to "this whole web of people" in the same way. If you run with (1) + (2), then shopping for equipment becomes drawing a relationship map, just by who the players decide their characters get Cool Stuff from. And then, of course, the GM (or whoever) can tie those relationships into all sorts of corporate and interpersonal conflicts, pulling each character in different directions to protect or acquire more Cool Stuff -- which should be not just character-bait but player-bait as well, of course, since gamers love getting their characters more toys.

Yeah, man, that's the idea! Everything the character has, including relationships, skills, social clout, everything has to be defined by the character's Cool Stuff. Since it's all tied together, whenever the player wants to put more of anything on there, they put more of everything on there. That's part of the concept, even if I do port it over to HQ. The way this is currently working in my head is the Cool Stuff comes like a keyword, with a couple abilities at the keyword rating, and that includes the Origin and potential drawbacks.