Personality mechanics

[RDU Neil]

I think most of these comments on Berzerk specifically are raising the question... "Is Berzerk a Personality Mechanic or not?" more than "is it an EFFECTIVE Personality Mechanic."

Really depends on how it is built and the intent.  No matter the system... what is the player trying to do with this idea of Berzerk.

Example:  Way back in '80-'81, when I first heard about the Barbarian AD&D class and the berzerk tendency... I remember one guy in the group thought it "so cool" while I thought it "so stupid."  To me, I could not grasp how having no armor and losing control and attacking in a fury was even REMOTELY beneficial.  Losing control has never appealed to me and thus I would always instinctively intend for Berzerk to be a Personality Mechanic.  Stepping back, I can see that focusing on fighting through pain and fatigue with a speed born of ferocity can be seen as a positive combat trait... so if that is the Intent, what you have is not a Personality Mechanic, but a Combat Mechanic with a personality SFX.  

The way Tommi wrote it up in the first post makes Berzerk sound more like the latter than the former... so to Ron's point, the player is just "playing by the rules" when he uses it to bash stuff.  Even if the game is supposed to show both positive and negative elements with Berzerk... too often a hard, mechanical benefit is supposedly "balanced" with a vague, undefined social hindrance.  That is not a good idea, IMO.  Separating the two... "You want combat effective berzerk... take Rule X.  If you want Personality Trait Berzekrk... take Rule Y" is a better way to look at it.  When conflated, too often the situation is "I took Berzerk on my character" but what is unsaid, and maybe even unconscious is "I wanted Rule X... and I'm either discounting Rule Y or am hoping it just won't come up in play"  

[TonyPace]

Back in the old days of 1e AD&D I had an acquaintance who always played a barbarian. Always always always. I seem to remember a wookie in a Star Wars game who carried a big axe-like thing too, and was definitely prone to bury it in the odd NPC's head. Not exactly a 'use the Force' type.

I remember one especially memorable night when the younger brother of the main GM decided to run an AD&D session. Something about a little town in the forest wanting us to go fight some baddies. As we went out, we decided (at Tom's urging) to go the 'wrong' way. Suddenly, magic elven archers appeared out of the forest shooting arrows at us, shouting at us to return to the true path.

Tom had had enough. We returned to town immediately, where he called for immediate conference with the mayor to discuss payment. The negotiations were interrupted by a sudden axe to the head. The town guard came to investigate, and after some desultory struggle - axe to the head time! One of the other PCs saw fit to question this turn of events. To my suprise, there was no axe to the head - instead he was stripped naked and delivered to the crowd outside.

The forest around the town was then set on fire, prompting the elves to attack, leading to the death of the party and most of the hostages in the town.

Robin Laws might call this guy a specialist, but he was mostly a specialist in giving the GM a headache.

Now, as I remember it, this guy was unique in our game in that he actually did the voices and got into playing the character a lot more than the rest of us did. And he was quite a barbarian type himself as well as being older than the rest of us.

But mechanically, all he had was lot of hit points and a weird fear of magic items, so at that level the berserk attitude was not coming from any mechanical input. Well, besides cheating.

I apologize for the slight diversion from the main subject, but I guess the point is that all the archetypal behaviours of this type of player can arise without any features of the system helping the player out.

[Tommi Brander]

Tommi, one thing I'm confused about is what problem you're identifying. Is the problem that berserking was too dangerous to the character, and therefore rarer than it should have been, based on his preferences?

Exactly.

I'll elaborate on the rule: It gives a large bonus to (most melee) attacks, a large bonus to damage, and even larger penalty to defense. Which, in essence, means that the character can take out formidable opponents, but is likely to get killed or seriously hurt if any live long enough to survive.
Those are written down. The rest, up to the player, who decided that the character will first slay enemies and then possibly attack friends. There is a decent chance (around 50%) of snapping out of the berserk when player wants. The character tends to berserk when seriously wounded or betrayed, or something equivalent. Only once did an ally get killed, and that was NPC.
And being a virtual death machine is not a problem. Only two players, both of whom excel at different fields (for the record, the other character is a young dragon, and quite powerful with magic).

So, the mechanic is dysfunctional if, and only if, character death is negative.


It still kind of bothers me that the mechanic effectively gives so severe penalties. I am still reading BW, but the traits, instincts and beliefs seem more eloquent. The entire paradigm of getting artha easier out of negative character features is great.

1.  Is it socially viable?  IE does ramping up the power of one player's character cause too much consternation in the other players?

No problem there. same with the third one.

2.  Is it creatively viable?  IE Does it add to the game?

Well, I run the setting in a very logical way, and try to make fantasy concepts viable there (the rules strive for simulationism, with the traditional gamism support, because it is a traditional game). Berserking is one of them. Maybe it should be avoided for PCs.

The source of the problem: I want simulationist rules, but chargen is involved and takes time, so character death is not welcomed. Berserking should be fine for the simulationism (which it is), but doesn't work for character survival.
Is this incoherency?

[Callan S.]

Hi Tommi,

Do you think the rule is dysfunctional, because the penalties involved will mean we wont often see who the barbarian is willing to go beserk on? And by missing out on seeing that, we miss out on finding out just who makes this guy angry enough to go beserk on?

[Tommi Brander]

That's pretty accurate. Yes. At least large part of the problem.

[contracycle]

Gareth, can you be more specific about the later sessions of Werewolf which really made that concept clear to everyone, or to enough people to affect such a major decision?

I'll give it a go but it was like 10 years ago.  I was a player in this game, unusually.

One event I recall was fight in the traditional warehouse against, I think, some black spiral dancers.  This event just went crazy.  I think it was the fact that suffering damage, or being exposed to dangerous weapons like fire and silver, provoked frenzy rolls that really caused the problem.  Those kind of weapons were quite common because everything else was pretty much useless, so it was a sort of all or nothing affair.  This meant that the initial exchange of fire as it were could well initiate a frenzy in a character at quite some distance, in which case the nearest targets were of course that characters allies.  That didn't happen too often becuase these players are habitually cautious, but the wharehouse fight was a real mess because there were people lying in ambush.  This turned into a sort of tragi-comic scenario in which a wolfie would enter the main space, get zapped by something, frenzy and run off into the distance.... it was like attacking the same hill again and again and being repulsed each time.

There were a couple of occasions of satisfying knock-down drag-out fights between two frenzying werewolves, which were cool to do, but the quantity of damage sustained  usually meant the winner would be incapacitated or nearly so as a result.  After all, neither of them are getting hit penalities due to injuries, so they could realistically win while on their last legs.  As a result these things were avoided like the plague, with the players relying heavily on ranged weaponry.

And on top of that was the continual problem of ending up stark naked after you had frenzied.  This produced an event in which a character broke into a store to steal clothes, only to end up frenzying on a security guard, and then by a sequence of bad luck being gunned down by the police.

The net result was that the frenzy was a problem you always had to watch for.  It was very good to get one person close to the enemy and frenzy on them, but it was quite easy to have your plan disrupted by a character frenzying too early, or in their frenzied state, spoiling the plan in some other manner.  And then recovering from the frenzied state and getting back to a safe zone where you could lick your wounds was itself a hassle and consumed a lot of play time.  Werewolves were kinda like a fire-and-forget missile, reliable on one target but that was all.  And almost totally incapable of achieveing whatever their mission objective was if there was any armed resistance.  Wanna steal some plans?  Forget it, you lost your lock picks when you burst out of your clothes, mission aborted.

All this and it seemed to me the real purpose of the Frenzy as it appears in werewolf stories was lost.  Buried in the character creation  section was some stuff dealing with your human family, but so much of the glitz and the toys was based on the pack/sept that actual human relationships were effectively off screen.  It made sense inasmuch the tendency to Frenzy did explain the outcast nature of the werewolves, but it also meant they simply didn't care, and were even more distant from normal humans than the Vampire games had been.  Which meant they lived in a world largely populated by equally powerful supernatural villains, and thus you did not get to feel like you were very tough.  And the personal trauma that does appear in such stories, in which the character feels guilty for presenting a danger to their loved ones, was totally missing.

So in the end, while it had its uses, and could be fun, over all it was much more hassle than it was worth, and effectively randomised charcter behaviour to such an extent that almost no planning could be done.

[Tobias]

I've encountered actual PC berserkers only in Werewolf: tA - because all Garou potentially are.

My players all took 'nerdlike' characters - high willpower over rage, thus never having to Frenzy. They did this deliberately.

PC Frenzy may have happened once, but I don't recall the details.

The tag-along NPC powerhouse combat she-wolf I provided for them at some point frenzied in the Umbra against undefeatable opponents (yes, beatable: by walking away). She took out a lot of nasty guys, and then died horribly. Possibly enforcing the point to my players that frenzy == teh bad. (Which leads me to think I should've posed them with a situation where their lack of frenzy prowess ('werewolfness') was a bad thing for them, but hey, can't do everything).

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tommi,

That is a very good question for people who'd like to focus on Simulationist goals of the "realism" variety: does high investment in the details of character creation conflict conflict with high potential for character death?

I'd tend to say "yes," and that various games have offered many possible solutions, not all of them satisfying. Here are some of the more interesting solutions, focusing on reducing the "loss/bad" factor of having a character die.

1. Pendragon focuses on the lineage of characters, rather than any single one as the sole point of play. If your character dies, you shift to playing his heir, typically. The dead character persists as part of the ongoing saga's richness. Note that initial character creation put a lot of detail into characters who are dead before play begins, so your "first guy," now dead, joins them. The new guy typically takes over (inherits) the old guy's lands and holdings, too.

2. The Riddle of Steel transfers points from dead characters to new ones, with no particular interest in in-game cause. The points come from a subtle mechanic in the game - the total amount of Spiritual Attribute points the character has spent in his career. SA's are very often used, but not as often spent; check out the game for more details, but this was a very interesting design choice that I wish would show up more often in actual-play accounts.

The reason I bring these two up is that they both have high doses of "realism" (casually defined), especially when it comes to combat damage, and character creation is exceptionally involved and embedded deeply in the setting. And, as it happens, both of them include fairly extensive and interesting rules about/for going berserk, in their secondary texts. (Wait ... I know I'm thinking of at least one Pendragon supplement, and now I'm trying to remember whether it's in The Flower of Battle for TROS or not ... help, someone.) They are also both pretty close to the Burning Wheel in a lot of ways; in fact, Pendragon's personality mechanics are revolutionary for their time and still a lot of fun to play.

Best,
Ron

[Tommi Brander]

I'd tend to say "yes," and that various games have offered many possible solutions, not all of them satisfying. Here are some of the more interesting solutions, focusing on reducing the "loss/bad" factor of having a character die.

I have read Pendragon some years ago. Sadly, it is hard for me to run it, as it strongly assumes a certain setting, and I am too perfectionist to not use it...
The personality rules (mechanics?) were interesting.
With tRoS I am somewhat familiar, having read the quickstart guide and random banter over the 'net. It deals pretty nicely with realistic system that makes characters not die if they use SA. That is something I might try in some game.
But does it really compensate for all the effort that has gone to chargen? Sure, it gives more powerful character, but that can be done with relevant ease in many other ways (starting from D&D's levels).

Multiverser somehow inserted the character into another setting, if I have understood correctly. Which sounds functional, though a bit limited when games are considered.



This is, at best, tangential, but

Pendragon's personality mechanics are revolutionary for their time and still a lot of fun to play.

They don't give much freedom of choice, IIRC. And you favour narrativism, IIRC. What am I missing?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Where did this idea come from that "barbarian = berserker = guy who hacks everyone in sight and can't tell friend from foe"?

I'm not an anthropologist or a folklorist, but as I recall the word "berserker" comes from medieval Norse warriors who psyched themselves up for battle, and tried to psyche out the enemy, by acting like fierce animals and wearing the animal's skin or having it depicted on their shields or helmets as a kind of totem -- typically the bear (hence "ber-") or wolf (hence the werewolf connection), but also bulls. I've read about historical berserkers biting their shields in frenzy. But otherwise the only crazy thing about them was that they would willingly go right up to an armed enemy and risk being hit themselves as they attack-- which is very atypical human behavior. Stone-age warriors mostly yell and posture and throw stuff from a safe distance, and usually only go for the kill when they've got the drop on someone -- in fact, anthropologists often distinguish between relatively bloodless face-to-face battles, often at arranged locations, and intentionally murderous raids to take an enemy village by surprise. Even in pitched ancient or medieval battles, most of the casualties didn't occur in the face-to-face fighting, when combatants were fairly cautious (a lot of poking at each other with spears from behind shields), but rather when one side broke and ran while the other hacked it down from behind. But walking right up to something dangerous and swapping blows with it is completely routine RPG behavior: In other words, the average "fighter" PC is probably a berserker by medieval standards.

There's one story I vaguely recall about Siegfriend and Sigismund (or somebody) turning themselves into wolves by magic and, after a while, starting to fight and bite each other; but even there the issue wasn't (as I recall) insanity, but becoming so savage that any disagreement turns to violence -- a genuine problem in warrior cultures. Otherwise, I don't recall any "guy goes beserk and hacks down his friend" stories in the mythology, the historical literature, or for that matter the original Howard Conan stories.

So what I am missing? Or is this whole "beserk" idea a geek culture artifact?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Sydney,

You're missing the extensive Nordic literature from the Middle Ages, including Njal's Saga. The berserkers were depicted in these stories basically as Hell's Angels, not only ferocious and indiscriminate killers in a fight, but also untrustworthy and unpredictable people in general, no good to have around in normal daily life. Sometimes they were tolerated as individuals among a group mainly through kinship or a friendship with the leader, and sometimes they bunched up and became essentially, well, as I said, Hell's Angels.

A few of the saga's heroes were berserkers (Egil, I think? the crude bard?), but not many. They often played the role of heavies, or dangerous henchmen.

How well these sagas are considered to reflect the details of real life at the time, I don't know. But the literary basis for the character-type is very strong.

To change the topic - Gareth, thanks for responding to my query. You really nailed a few key points.

Tommi, I'm talking about Pendragon being enjoyable from a strong Simulationist perspective, so my own top preferences aren't important. I'm also thinking that we could talk about Narrativist goals which do include rules that restrict character behavior, but you're right - it's a tangent and shouldn't be in this thread.

Speaking of this thread, do you think you've reached a conclusion about your initial question and point? If so, what is it? Are there any changes you plan to make to the rules of your game?

Best,
Ron

[Tommi Brander]

Speaking of this thread, do you think you've reached a conclusion about your initial question and point? If so, what is it? Are there any changes you plan to make to the rules of your game?

I don't believe I'll be changing anything much, but I might put a few suggestions (authority to change has been given to one player who likes the system more). I am not terribly happy with the game and will start GMing Burning Wheel, instead of starting new games with the hearbreaker.

Conclusion: berserking is often inappropriate for PCs, simply because it is too deadly for that character and often the party.
Which changes it into social contract stuff. The player must know what he is going into, and other players must explicitly allow a berserker.

[Storn]

Tommi, this is a bit of thread drift (I apologize to y'all).

First.  I like your conclusion summery, well written. 

But thread drift part:  I love Burning Wheel, playtested a combat, not sure if it is for me to GM, but I still love it.  Much of BW I will probably canabilize in spirit if not in actual mechanic for my own prefered Savage Worlds fantasy.  BUT  I would be interested in your thoughts and your game and I hope you share it with us when you get to that point.

[Tommi Brander]

BW is a good piece of GMing advice, in addition to being a good game. I'll try conflict resolution the next time I play any RPG. Including my hearbreaker.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Great thread, everyone. I think it's run its course for the original purpose, so I'm closing it now. Any topics in it that you'd like to see pursued should be taken to their own threads.

Best,
Ron