[LoL] New Mechanic

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Those are great ideas, but doen;t quite fit my ideas. The stereotype mechanic is too overt. I was thinking of something like the following:
  When a player declares that they want to use a Destiny Point, that Player and the Judge need to talk about what they want to do. What needs to be understood:

• What is being added to the story (a character, an item, an event, subplot, etc.)?
• What is the urgency of the addition (does the element need to be added immediately, eventually, gradually)?
• What characters are affected (PCs, NPCs)?
• What characters are required for the addition (more relevant with subplots, but it is vital to consider)?
• When it will conclude.

Other players should make suggestions, additions, comments as ideas occur to them. The player spending the point has veto power on any suggestions, and the Judge has final approval. Players want to be careful not to derail the current adventure and other players should be careful not to make suggestions that are too outlandish or subvert the original intention of the declaring players idea.
Example
  Eric, Nate, Cheryl and Pat are on an adventure in the Fisher Kingdom. They determine that they need to contact a criminal from this part of the country. Nate's character is a Leshy, so he feels that his character would have a chance to know someone. He declares that he wants to spend a Destiny Point. He wants to come across an old family friend, Cheryl suggests that it could be an old girlfriend, Pat suggests that they have turned to a life of crime and Eric suggests that they are married. Nate is OK with the suggestions and the Judge approves.

  Whenever the Judge feels that a player or character has done something out of the ordinary to advance the current plot, they should award the player a Destiny Point immediately.
Example
  Later in the same adventure, Pat's Warrior outsmarts an NPC and learns the location of the Bandit's hideout. The Judge is impressed that the Warrior decided to use his brains instead of his brawn, so Pat's character gets a Destiny Poiint.
  Do you think it needs a tweak?

[Adam Dray]

  Other players should make suggestions, additions, comments as ideas occur to them. The player spending the point has veto power on any suggestions, and the Judge has final approval. Players want to be careful not to derail the current adventure and other players should be careful not to make suggestions that are too outlandish or subvert the original intention of the declaring players idea.

I'd be more interested in seeing an example of how things play out when the Judge uses his veto over the player's idea.

What is the Judge protecting here? What criteria does the Judge use to determine if he should veto a player's suggestion?

Also, ask yourself, what legitimate motivation might a player have for "derailing the current adventure"?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Well, that is intended as a reminder. It is just possible that a player might come up with a good idea, but that that idea is not practical at this time. Do you have a suggestio n for better wording or mechanics?

[Arturo G.]

Trust your players. All of you want to have a good playing experience. You can just negotiate it. If you explain clear reasons for something not being convenient or interesting most people will accept it. Don't discard it completely, just negotiate something reasonable in-between.

The problem with the veto is that it is very easy for the GM to cut the potential nice ideas of the other players because they don't fit with her preconceived idea of how is the imaginary world, or much worse, what is going to happend in HER world. Then, the players do not enjoy so much because they are not so actively participating as the GM is doing. Well, I'm afraid I'm assuming a Narrativist creative agenda... isn't it?

Cheers,
Arturo

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

If the GM has the final say, the GM has all the say. This rule, as you've written it, says, "The players get to guess what the GM wants, and if they're right, they get a goodie!"

Give the players a mechanic so you don't have to play "Who's sleeping with the GM?" (NB: you can still play this game if no one's sleeping with the GM. In fact, it might make the problem more pronounced.)

Make it so that Destiny can be spent within your stereotype — which you'll have to define, because they're your stereotypes — for cheap, but it's more expensive to spend it elsewhere. Then design your scenario creation system so that characters will want to be outside of stereotype. Make the princess players choose between being rescued or rescuing. Make the clerics decide between killing and healing. Make the humans decide between progress and environment.

... or some such. Personally, I like the idea of choosing a class with limited usefulness and piling on personal experience until the character's unrecognizable.

I like the idea of a Princess who has the trait "I no longer fear death."

[Sydney Freedberg]

The stereotype mechanic is too overt.

Oh, it probably is. But the point is that if your game is going to be about "breaking stereotypes" (as opposed to, "by the way, stereotypes get broken in this game, ok?"), then those stereotypes need to have some kind of power in the game, which probably needs to be mechanical power in the rules -- otherwise, what's there to fight against?

But returning to the main point people were making:

  Eric, Nate, Cheryl and Pat are on an adventure in the Fisher Kingdom. They determine that they need to contact a criminal from this part of the country. Nate's character is a Leshy, so he feels that his character would have a chance to know someone. He declares that he wants to spend a Destiny Point. He wants to come across an old family friend, Cheryl suggests that it could be an old girlfriend, Pat suggests that they have turned to a life of crime and Eric suggests that they are married. Nate is OK with the suggestions and the Judge approves.

Why shouldn't this happen all the time in any roleplaying game? Why do players have to spend some kind of resource to make it happen? That seems to send a message of "Having input over anything but your own character is rare and special! It'll cost you to make it happen -- and it doesn't cost the GM anything to veto you."

When I'm a player, my attitude is, "we're all playing this game and making stuff up together -- it's not the GM's sandbox where we get to look-but-don't-touch by his generous permission!" And when I'm a GM, my attitude is, "don't expect me to make up a whole world by myself! The more you players create, the less work I have to do, the less guessing I have to do about what you want, and the richer the whole story's going to be!"

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Clearly I need to re-write the rules. The Destiny mechanic is supposed allow the player to add something to their character that they neglected for whatever reason during charcter creation.
  Also, the Judge aka GM does not have veto power. Once a Destiny point is spent, something will heppen, they just have the ability to approve the whole addition or ask for a revision. While the player that spends the point has a "line item" veto to take or exclude suggestions from other players. The idea is that it IS an negotiation. Two players have key powers, and the rest are just helping if they have something to suggest. The spending player comes up with the original idea and potentially how it is implemented, the Judge just has a say because even if it's a good idea it may be redundant (the Judge was already adding something like that anywways), out of genre or otherwise unintentionally inappropriate.
  It seems like you all want to trust the players implicitely and not give the GM any say in the matter. Seems like we need to find a balance. Give each of the main participants an equal say...
  Any suggestoins how we can do that?

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

What you're suggesting means that the Judge has power over a vanishingly small number of items and details. If he doesn't like the player's input, he can simply make it irrelevant.

A simple answer: make the GM spend resources like everyone else to make the story go. His votes matter because he votes more. Make sure he's got enough to make things appropriately detailed and difficult.

The Shadow of Yesterday does this with its Bonus Dice and Keys mechanics, and Dogs in the Vineyard has a tightly prescribed role for the GM, whose resources are infinite but contextually related.

For a more radical, anarchosyndicalist approach, I recommend you check out Ralph Mazza and Mike Holmes' Universalis and my two games, Under the Bed and the in-process Shock: Social Science Fiction. They all deal with the power dynamic between players by having no particular GM figure (though there are people doing the GM's jobs, don't worry).

[Sydney Freedberg]

Definitely check out some of those games. But even sticking within a traditional GM-player division:

It seems like you all want to trust the players implicitely and not give the GM any say in the matter.

Trust the players implicitly, yes, yes, yes, a hundred times. The GM is a player too, though, so s/he should certainly have a say -- just not a say that is overwhelmingly more powerful than anyone else. If you want it to be a "negotiation," then no one person can have "final say" with any restriction.

The Destiny mechanic is supposed allow the player to add something to their character that they neglected for whatever reason during charcter creation.

Maybe I'm being confused by your wording. When you say "neglected," that implies to me that I, as a player, am supposed to specify all such backstory details -- who I know, who I'm related to, etc. -- during character generation, and inventing new details on the fly is somehow bad. But if we're really developing our characters, then we should learn more and more about them as time goes on, which means that ideas I'll have about my character during play will probably be better than those I had during chargen. Besides, as a practical matter, you can't possibly expect me, as a player, to come up with a list of every person my character knows -- all the relatives, all the old girlfriends, etc. etc. -- and where they live during character generation!

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

My next plan, actually, is to have all character creation happen in play. I'm not sure what game it goes into, but I've got some ideas.

I mean, most of the time, the stuff you put on your character sheet is irrelevant to some degree. That means that, due to conflicting visions of play, some players have wasted their resources, blowing any idea of inter-character parity away.

Note that in the second ed. of Prime Time Adventures, the number of features your characters have is reduced from first ed. You just wound up with stuff that wasn't relevant!

[Adam Dray]

It isn't a negotiation if you have to convince the GM to get your way. The GM holds all the power in that model. It isn't a negotiation if the GM has no power to overrule the player, ever, either. The player holds all the power in that model. There are disadvantages to both models.

If the GM has all the power, then all creative control is in the hands of one player. Certainly, players can contribute, but history shows that players will tend to take a back seat in creating setting and situation content and just let the GM do it. Or they'll eagerly try to introduce new stuff, "hit" some of the time and get the GM's approval and "miss" a lot of the time and get vetoed. The more they miss, they more they try passive-aggressively to guess what the GM wants. This stifles player creativity even when the GM doesn't mean to.

If the player has all the power, the GM has to trust the players to guide the story somewhere good. This will happen more often than you think -- if you give them the tools to do it. The danger is that a single player will do something whacky and the other players (and GM) won't like it. There are different ways to handle it: require unanimous vote, require majority vote, require a "second," spend resources instead of votes, or (the simplest) the other players just suck it up.

Think about an improv jazz band. You have a bunch of musicians doing their own thing. You've all agreed on a few things: key, time signature, maybe some specific transitions. The rest is up to the individuals. Each trusts one another to play nice. They take turns at solos. All this takes a lot of trust and communication -- eye contact, watching each other's fingers, relying on well known modes and themes, and so on. If the jazz guitarist starts blaring distorted Jimi Hendrix in the middle of Watermelon Man, the group is gonna get pissed. If he keeps doing it, maybe you don't invite him to the next gig. How do you validate his contribution to the music? A vote? Who is to say if it's good or bad?

Roleplaying is a lot like that, only there's usually time to talk things over before they happen. It's like the guitarist being able to say, "Hey, can I slip a bit of Foxy Lady into the middle of this jazz song? I think it'll be cool." And the rest of the band might go WTF? and give it a try, or they may say no way.

Make sense?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Adam gets it!
  I am not trying to give one player final say, I am giving two players final say.
  And no Sydney, I don't expect you to know every atomic-level detail of your charcter at char gen. But if another character is a long lost buddy, you'd think they would deserve a mention... The GM has volunteered to spend extra time on the campaign, they have at least as much invested as every other player at the table, let's trust them not to be a jerk as much as we trust the players to be creative and fun to play with, OK? And I'l re-write it so that this idea is somehow conveyed.
  I'll work on the wording and post again, til then, can anyone come up with a revised wording that they want to share?

[Adam Dray]

I get it, but I'm not convinced that you do. =) I'm strongly implying that it's better to put the control in the hands of 3-4 players who have a stake in the game in the form of a character, than it is to put the control solely in the hands of a GM who doesn't have a character.

My game Verge gives the players tools to tell the GM what they want their stories to be about. They pick Enemies and Weaknesses that the GM uses to create adversity. Before the game starts, the players and GM collectively come up with a larger story around which they wrap their own stories during play. Does your game do anything like that?

Put a different way: In your game, how is Situation created?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Well, this is how I want the destiny mechanic to work. A player, who is not the GM, has a brilliant idea, they say they are going to spend a Destiny Point. From that point forward, something is going to happen that the GM did not originally intend. The player states their idea. other players suggest additions, deletions and modifications. The initial player with the idea combines them in a way that they feel is appropriate for their character and the story and the Judge approves it. The story moves in an altered way from that point on and everyone is happy.
  Pitfalls I want to avoid:
1 ) Player comes up with an idea that is not fun for the other players, not in genre or is otherwise a good idea at the wrong time. I know this shouldn't happen, but every once in a while, players come up with ideas that they think are cool that are clearly not.
2 ) Jerk GM domineers the players into using their points into doing what the GM was going to do anyways. I know this is rare, but sometimes a GM thinks they are saving the players from themselves.
3 ) Unwieldy system that is not worth implementing. If we can focus the system on producing the desired results without involving complex math or a bizarre voting scheme, that's wonderful. That's why it is supposed written as the spending player and the Judge must both approve. If there is an unusal number/mix of players that makes unanimous, majority or other voting scheme impossible, then we have to write more riules to compensate, etc...
  I am still swishing the re-write around in my brain, any suggestions?

[Sydney Freedberg]

....something is going to happen that the GM did not originally intend.

Things the GM didn't intend should be happening all the time. If I'm GMing and my players don't surprise me, I feel let down. The whole point of playing with other people is so they can come up with cool stuff I wouldn't have imagined by myself. If only what I intend to have happen, happens, I might as well go play by myself. (I said "by"! Not "with"! Jeez.)

"Spend a point, have some influence over the wider world beyond your character" is sometimes used as a way to make traditional roleplayers more comfortable with the idea that the players are telling this story, too. But I'd rather have it out in the open: Any time you have a cool idea, say it! Then, of course, we'll negotiate, and we'll try to make it work because we're all friends and trying to have fun, but yeah, maybe it won't work at all, or maybe it'll have to be modified. Whatever.

Player input should be a constant, not a special case. As a player, I should get to suggest stuff to the group all the time, for free. If I actually spend some kind of resource, then, darn it, I want to get more than the right to suggest, I want to make it happen! Only if one person says, "no, no, that'll ruin my fun, really" or "that really creeps me out, really, stop, no," or everyone but me says "that sucks," should I have to take it back.

(I'm saying "should" and "always" when I know people play very differently and still have lots fun. I don't think they have as much fun as they could have, though).