[Mythos] Its Conflict resolution-tastic! (or is it?)

[Eric Bennett]

So, I've figured out how I want to do my conflict resolution, and wanted to put it up to see if I have any gaping mechanical holes in things, prior to taking this to playtest mode (which ought to happen in the next few nights, depending on my players' schedules).

Note: I'm leaving out the Story Mode stuff, which you can read about in a very larval form here: http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=369&page=1#Item_6

Alright, lets pick up at the point that someone calls a Conflict.

Step 1: Setting some stakes. This works, basically, like just about every other stakes-setting game out there. Side A picks what they get if they win, side B does the same, if there is disagreement then they go back to the drawing board. Once both sides have agreed to the stakes, they then need to determine the importance of the conflict.

Step 2: There are three levels of importance to conflicts, and these distinctions serve two primary goals. Firstly, the depending on the level of the conflict, a side will need to accumulate a greater number of successes in order to achieve victory. Secondly, the number of Karma/Fate/Plot Points/Pennies/Gum Drops the characters get for participating in or winning a conflict are determined by the level.

Minor Conflicts only require one success to be gained in order to win them. The winner receives 2 Karma, the loser receives one. Most things that in other games would be (non-combat) task resolution would be a minor conflict in this game. Of course, anything can be minor as long as the participants agree to it. Knocking out Generic Russian Soldier A75 doesn't really matter much to Solid Snake's story, does it?

Significant Conflicts are generally more important to the story. The character must accumulate three successes to win, with the winner receiving 6 Karma and the loser taking home 3. Most fights, magical rituals, debates, research (for investigative type games) etc. will be Significant.

Major Conflicts should come along maybe once or twice a session. The big flashy showdown against the enemy aces in a mecha show, the big brawl with the cultists down by the bayou, the last stand against the psycho killer, the end-of-level boss fights, the Supreme Court hearing that will determine the future of this country...these would all be major conflicts. To win one of these, the character must gather five total successes. The winner receives 10 Karma, while the loser(s) take 5.

Step 3: Action! The diceplay of the game ought to be relatively simple. Players have pools of Resources (Stamina, Lore, Composure, Will) that they spend to activate their Traits, which will in turn contribute their dice rating to the player's side. Each Trait costs one point of an appropriate Resource to use, and Traits are rated on a scale of dice ranks (d4/d6/d8/d10/d12), and can only be activated once each round. A round is one opposed roll, and the winner of the role gets one success. The following round, used Traits can be employed once again. (Maybe some kind of exhaustion mechanic so that the exact same Traits don't get used in the exact same combination each Round?) This repeats until one side has gathered the needed number of successes.

Of course, that is just the mechanics side of it. The players will need to narrate their actions each round, tieing the activated Traits into their character's actions in some manner. With a maximum of nine rounds of narration for a Major conflict, I think this won't wear thin on a single conflict. Think "Shab Al-Hiri Roach" with potentially several rounds to a single conflict.


Step 4: Conseqiences. The participants all take their share of the Karma. Then, the winner is required by the rules to spend at least half of this won Karma bringing the stakes into play. This is a simple matter of spending a certain number of these points to modify the Style Sheets (sort of like combination Lore Sheets (or at least my interpretation thereof based on second hand information) and traditional character sheets, that contain the setting and situation of the game as created by the players and GM.) This could mean adding Traits, raising or lowering them, whatever. Once this is done, the conflict resolution system turns off, and the story mode system turns back on.

So, what do I want to know? Well, three things...

1) There are lots and lots (and lots) of games which play with conflict resolution rules. Which, if any, does this strike anyone as similar to, and why? Is the game in question a good thing to be similar to, or not?

2) Resource management powers the conflict system. Characters cannot just "do things" when folks call a conflict, they must burn Resources. Given that these Resources are refueled by the story mode (which, to sum up, rewards characters Resource points for narrating in elements of the game world), does this model hold any appeal to the conflict resolution crowd?

3) There are five ranks to any element. Presently I have these divided up die size. Given that 2-3 elements on each side rated from 1 to 5 should be average for a single round, would using d6 dicepools or cards either require too many fiddly bits (said dice and cards) or affect the feel of the system in a negative way? I ask because if I determine this not to be the case, I will include variant rules suggestions that will allow folks to use said dicepools or cards.

Hopefully that is enough to create some useful feedback. If you have any questions, ask and I'll get an answer for you.

Thanks for your time,
Eric

[Anders Larsen]

Well, I have a question (taken from p19):

How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

I am asking this because I can not see how this resolution system really support your game.

I will repeat some of what I said in your last Mythos thread: What I find most fascinating in your game is that the characters will question their perception of reality, and because of this, either go mad or find enlightenment. This is what I really want to see as a basis for your resolution system.

And if you base your system on this it will be unique for your game, and then you don't have to be concerned about it being to similar to other games'.

- Anders

[Eric Bennett]

And if you base your system on this it will be unique for your game, and then you don't have to be concerned about it being to similar to other games'.

Oh yes, certainly. That question may not have come off with quite the tone I intended for it. I was simply curious if there were any previous designs which worked along the same lines.

As for the mechanical route of focusing on causing characters to question their reality, that is something that would be handled by the "story mode" side of the mechanics. While I do have some concern that not focusing on that may make the game a touch too "generic", I feel that a mechanical focus on the surreal side of things is a less desireable option than allowing a mechanical bias towards that. Something of a combination of Design What Matters (ie: rules that get in the way and shape player behavior as desired to suit the game) and Design What Doesn't Matter (mechanics that get out of the way and let the players determine how they will be playing.) Here, let me format this like so..

How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

Mythos is a game about three things.

1) Building a Mythos of the players' own.

2) Exploring that Mythos.

3) Exploring the response by those characters to that Mythos.

The resolution mechanics on their own do not directly reinforce those, I don't believe, outside of the fact that all the Traits the characters will be pulling into conflicts are going to derived from 1 and 3. I'm still working on writing up my Style Sheet system, but the basics of it are in my last post on the thread I linked to. However.

1) This is addressed directly by the Style Sheets, which share a bit of heritage with some Universalis ideas, and a bit with (what I have read about) Lore Sheets in Weapons of the Gods. Basically, players will be spending Karma points generated by the conflict system to add elements onto Style Sheets for different things. Style Sheets will vary in scope, to be sure, but I don't have any interest in mechanically differentiating that scope. What might have a Style Sheet? Pretty much anything that would show up in such a story: characters are defined by their Style Sheets, locations, alien artifacts, bizarre events, odd creatures, whatever.

However, there will be a few different semi-standardized "templates" to help the players out, depending on what kind of Mythos game they are interested in playing, but they won't require any fiddling around with the actual mechanics. Traditional Call of Cthulhu-style play (research, investigate, action!, digestion, research, etc.) is a different breed of animal from surreal games like Silent Hill or (interestingly enough) Hellraiser: Inferno, which is in turn (to go a bit extreme) different from the play one might get if Hecatomb were an RPG.  Those types of games would be more about having a set of elements with far, far deeper meaning than they initially appeared to, and would therefore have a greater focus on increasing depth of such elements as opposed to increasing their variety.

2) Okay, so let us suppose the players have gotten from their standing start to being in possession of some kind of setting. Why should they explore it? Conflict and Resources. Conflict uses up Resources, but is the primary way of gaining the ability to expand the setting and the characters, while Resources can only be recovered by the use of that setting. How will this work? By narrating in the Traits that have been put down on the Style Sheets, players will receive a certain number of their Resource points back, based on the rank of that Trait. Because the Resource points are divided into four pools, Traits are likely to need to be tagged to show which pools they would restore, but sensible people ought to be able to do it with a minimum of rules-fu.

Why do it like this? In order to expand the setting and broaden their characters, players must engage in conflicts. In order to be effective in conflicts, characters must have a decent variety of Traits. In order to be effective in using those Traits, characters must incorporate the Mythos they have created into their narrative. By coupling the two parts together in a fairly tight manner, I think that this will prevent either half from becoming dull or predictable.

3) Between 1 and 2, I think that this goal takes care of itself. The players have an investment in their setting and in their characters which have they directly caused to be the way they are. Someone at the table cares about everything on the table, or it wouldn't be there. The character responses to the Mythos is a simple result of the fallout from conflicts being dealt with in interesting ways, though my Sanity system is also going to be another means of dealing with such things. In fact, Sanity may become a Resource pool of its own by the time I finish...

Anyway, I need to head out to work for the morning, I'll post some more later. Read and reply, if you please, and have a great day.

-Eric Bennett

[Danny_K]

1) There are lots and lots (and lots) of games which play with conflict resolution rules. Which, if any, does this strike anyone as similar to, and why? Is the game in question a good thing to be similar to, or not?

2) Resource management powers the conflict system. Characters cannot just "do things" when folks call a conflict, they must burn Resources. Given that these Resources are refueled by the story mode (which, to sum up, rewards characters Resource points for narrating in elements of the game world), does this model hold any appeal to the conflict resolution crowd?

3) There are five ranks to any element. Presently I have these divided up die size. Given that 2-3 elements on each side rated from 1 to 5 should be average for a single round, would using d6 dicepools or cards either require too many fiddly bits (said dice and cards) or affect the feel of the system in a negative way? I ask because if I determine this not to be the case, I will include variant rules suggestions that will allow folks to use said dicepools or cards.

1) Heroquest, maybe?   
2) In theory, it sounds neat.  The better a player is at unfolding his own Mythos, the more effective he gets in conflicts.  It's an interesting hybrid of Sim and Nar approaches. 
3)I think you have to actually try these out.  A system using pools of D6's will have very different probabilties that a system using different die sizes -- to begin with, one will have a bell-curve distribution and the other won't.  This is a non-trivial question which can only be answered IMO through actual testing. 

Now I've got some questions for you:
1) Not to echo Anders too much, but does this system actually do what you want it to do?  Do you want the guy who unpacks his Mythos in the best way to be more mechanically effective in conflicts? 

2) How will the system handle a character who is min/maxed -- their whole concept and development is focused on developing a small number of widely usable Traits and enough Resources to power them? 

3) I notice that you have three different levels of conflict, which differ only in the number of successes needed and in the amount of payoff.  I also get the impression that the level of conflict is up to the GM to decide.  Since the mechanics are all exactly the same in each case, the only real difference is that a higher-level conflict will cost more resources to resolve, with a greater payoff at the end that may or may not outweigh the resources invested in the conflict.  I wonder if there's a way to make just one kind of conflict, and let it get bigger or smaller depending on how important it is to the players? 

4) Whatever size conflict, the loser gets X Karma points, the winner gets X Karma points to keep and X Karma points he has to spend immediately on his Loresheet.  Right?  It seems to me that, in any conflict, the best approach is to fold immediately if it seems like you're going to lose.  Conversely, if it seems like you're going to lose and this is a very important conflict for you, is there a way to risk more in order to win? 

I hope these questions are helpful and not impertinent. 

Danny

[Anders Larsen]

Mythos is a game about three things.

1) Building a Mythos of the players' own.

2) Exploring that Mythos.

3) Exploring the response by those characters to that Mythos.

It seems I have misunderstood what your game is about. You may want to be a little more explicit about this on you website, because if I read your introduction, I get a completely different idea.

I have now read your Style Sheet idea more carefully. There are some interesting ideas of how to tell a story, but I can not see how this is even biased toward your setting. As it is now your setting just seems like some added colour.

This may not be a problem, but I really liked some of the stuff I read in the introduction to your game. And I think it would be interesting if it was more a part of the game.

Related to your question: I can not see that there is any direct problem with your mechanic, but it is a little strange that there is three modes of play: Conflict mode, story mode and battle mode. I would say that conflict mode and story mode would be enough.

Note: I do not have huge experience with conflict resolution, so I may be wrong.

- Anders

[Eric Bennett]

I'm just heading out to eat now, so I'll more thorough replies when I get back but...

1) Regarding HeroQuest: I keep hearing good things about this, and it is one of the few games which gets frequently talked about here that is actually stocked by my local gaming store folks. I'll head down tonight or tomorrow to skim over it and see what I can see.

2) Regarding effectiveness being connected to developing the Mythos: Yes, that is fairly strongly what I am after, when I think about it. The "push" of the game at this point is focus on building and then living in a setting of the players own creation. Mechanically rewarding that is something that I feel is a positive quality, though I will be including a "safety valve" for those players who may not be the best at unpacking. I'm not sure how I want to do this yet, but that is what playtesting is for, right? Off the top of my head, perhaps I could reward players for doing interesting things with those elements already in play? This would probably be a Fan Mail type thing where the other players go "cool" and award points. I definitely have this flagged already as something to work on.

3) Regarding my Introduction to the Mythos draft on my website: Yeah, that is true. The current Style Sheet thing came about from my work for the mythos building subsystem in the original draft. It got to something a bit before this point, at which time I asked myself if I should just unify character and situation building into one unit. Things are still moving around and being toyed with at the moment. Don't worry about my setting just winding up as color. ^_~ Either the Style Sheets will be sucked back into it, or I will install something else in it. I am still very jazzed about that setting and the questions you can ask with it, I'm just trying to find a good way to do it.

4) As for my setting and mechanics being somewhat divorced: At the moment, this is rather true. I am not entirely opposed to this, but I know the concern you are expressing. If it turns out that I cannot tighten things back up after getting Style Sheets worked out, I'll spin this off as something else and go back to percentiles and all the clattering  joy they represent for Mythos itself, and make it do what I want some other way.

4b) Regarding Battle and Conflict Mode...that is just me not proofreading myself. When I first conceived of the idea for the split my head was in console game-land, so it got tagged Battle. Conflict mode is the working term for it, since it is for more than just "battles." I'll proofread more carefully in the future.

I'll hit the rest of Danny_K's questions when I get back. They are excellent points, and deserve some more robust answers than I can give at this point.

Soups n' Sandwiches n' Sorcery, oh my!
Eric

[Eric Bennett]

2) How will the system handle a character who is min/maxed -- their whole concept and development is focused on developing a small number of widely usable Traits and enough Resources to power them? 

Right now it looks like the way the game would handle this situation would be

• "Exhaustion" of traits. A very strong candidate for addittion to these rules is a ruling that you cannot use a Trait twice in a row during conflict.
• Inefficient use of resources. This one you couldn't have know about it, because I think the germ of the idea is still buried in a copy of this somewhere, but basically when a player pays to tie two Style Sheets together, there are a couple of different relationships they can establish. One of those relationships enables a character (for example) to use Traits on the targeted Style Sheet as though they were on the character's sheet. The clearest parallel to this in mainstream gaming? Classes. The group as a whole adds Traits to the Science Ninja SuperTeam Style Sheet, and then buys Science Ninja Super Team member as one of their personal Traits, letting them use whatever has been put down as a Trait on the SNST Style Sheet. So...to sum up, a character who develops high level set of broadly applicable Traits not effectively using their resources as a member of the group. This needs punched up, but I hope the idea got through.
• I think you crazy Forge folk call it the "Social Contract". You wouldn't pull something like that in a game of PTA, would you? There should be an understanding that the goal of play at the table is to tell interesting stories to each other. Mechanically, I think this is a fine argument for a Karma-as-Fan-Mail system, and socially players should be more mature than that. Why not do something more about it? Because I feel that the more rules you add to stop munchkinism the more headaches you cause those players and groups that have moved beyond that.
• Lastly, simple boredom. Setting oneself up to win conflicts like that left and right is a good way to run out of interesting things to spend Karma on.

3) I notice that you have three different levels of conflict, which differ only in the number of successes needed and in the amount of payoff.  I also get the impression that the level of conflict is up to the GM to decide.  Since the mechanics are all exactly the same in each case, the only real difference is that a higher-level conflict will cost more resources to resolve, with a greater payoff at the end that may or may not outweigh the resources invested in the conflict.  I wonder if there's a way to make just one kind of conflict, and let it get bigger or smaller depending on how important it is to the players? 

This element needs to be targeted in playtesting, but in actuality the escalation of conflict along the scale will be player-determined. Add in an 'invisible' level of conflict below Minor, where the outcome of the action either isn't something the players particularly care about, or is handwaved, or whatever. Automatic successes. Minor conflicts are the kinds of things that make for somewhat interesting things to "risk", but aren't terribly crucial, important, or complicated. A list of guidelines for these are going to be written up, and will form (ideally) one of only three documents that need to be on the table during play. (The Story Mode system on one page, the Conflict Mode system on another, and then the Scale of Conflicts on a third. Or all on one. Whatever, you know?)

Basically, the level of conflict is determined by several factors

• How much the players care about the outcome of the action.
• The scope of the action's consequences.
• How much the acting player is willing to risk to gain. Voluntary escalation.

So, basically, I agree with what you said, and think I have a direction to go on this issue. One last note on this question: when it comes to the payoff from the Resources spent, it should be noted that players will, ideally, be able to cycle through their entire pool at least twice in one session. Regenerating the pool requires both introducing new elements to the game and then actually using them in play, providing some light mechanical reinforcement for a touch of pacing. Examples will make this idea clearer, I hope, but rest assured that what is being risked is not exactly as rare as gold.

4) Whatever size conflict, the loser gets X Karma points, the winner gets X Karma points to keep and X Karma points he has to spend immediately on his Loresheet.  Right?  It seems to me that, in any conflict, the best approach is to fold immediately if it seems like you're going to lose.  Conversely, if it seems like you're going to lose and this is a very important conflict for you, is there a way to risk more in order to win? 

You have the Karma setup down correctly, yes. I hadn't thought of a player thinking like that regarding the system...I played around earlier with the idea of giving all the parties to a conflict the same amount of Karma, with the difference being that the winner had to spend half of theirs. That way, you create a reward for winning (you get what you want now) and a reward for losing (you can get what you want in an even bigger/more complex/whatever way later). I can see how this might actually lead some people to set up conflicts that they know they cannot win, in order to gain the Karma for later. And, to tell the truth, I think that is a great behavior for the game to reward. Why? Because the winner's Karma is going to go somewhere, and that going somewhere is going to drive the game.

Note: Regarding the spending of Karma, would it be a viable route to require that any Trait which has been added or modified by Karma be narrated into the next scene in the story? So that things are written on the Style Sheets and then "established" into the IC world? This might have to be handled with short little scenes in cases like an ancient god growing stronger, or what have you, but...how does that idea strike folks?

[Danny_K]

• I think you crazy Forge folk call it the "Social Contract". You wouldn't pull something like that in a game of PTA, would you? There should be an understanding that the goal of play at the table is to tell interesting stories to each other. Mechanically, I think this is a fine argument for a Karma-as-Fan-Mail system, and socially players should be more mature than that. Why not do something more about it? Because I feel that the more rules you add to stop munchkinism the more headaches you cause those players and groups that have moved beyond that.
• Lastly, simple boredom. Setting oneself up to win conflicts like that left and right is a good way to run out of interesting things to spend Karma on.

OK, I think this is a big red flag.  Both of these statements suggest that there's a known flaw in the rules, and that you're outsourcing responsibility for fixing that flaw to the players. What happens if one of the players really, really likes what he's coming up with and so uses the rules, perfectly legally, to run roughshod over the other players?  I can see myself doing that in the heat of the moment - I like my own cooking. If the system has no way to handle this other than saying "Man don't be a twink", that's a problem. 

In particular, a good conflict resolution system should avoid this problem: look at Dogs in the Vineyard -- I can make a very unbalanced, very min-maxed character with Traits like "I am the wrathful hand of the King of Life" and "I can shoot a fly in the eye" and load up on lots of big excellent guns... and the game still works.  Sure, it might get tiresome if you've got one Dog who's all shooting all the time, but the system doesn't break down, and if the other players don't like the shootiness, they've got a rock-solid Conflict system for getting the combat-oriented Dog to back off. 

So in addition to Heroquest, look at Dogs.  Actually, play some Dogs if you haven't to see how nicely the system works. 
If it isn't clear, by the way, I'm looking forward to seeing the full version of the rules and maybe even taking them for a spin.
Yours, Danny

[Eric Bennett]

OK, I think this is a big red flag.  Both of these statements suggest that there's a known flaw in the rules, and that you're outsourcing responsibility for fixing that flaw to the players. What happens if one of the players really, really likes what he's coming up with and so uses the rules, perfectly legally, to run roughshod over the other players?  I can see myself doing that in the heat of the moment - I like my own cooking. If the system has no way to handle this other than saying "Man don't be a twink", that's a problem.

Yup, you've got me there. Those are rather weak answers to a very important question.  And you have probably sold me Dogs...such a shame, isn't it? *chuckles* However, at the moment my bank card is tied up in the Bank One/Chase transfer thing, so I'm unable to purchase it at the moment. If I could ask a general question about it, what do you mean by saying that the Conflict system can be used by the players to get the trigger happy player to "back off?"

I think the point in my rules as they stand now where a mechanical solution could be introduced in the refreshing of Resource pools. I don't have terribly specific numbers worked out, but more than 6 or 7 points in one pool is where I would like them to cap out at. If a player is shoving his cooking onto everyone else's plates, that means that he is burning through resources at a faster rate than they are, and will run out of the ability to act to such a degree fairly quickly. In order to get them back, he has to cool his heels a while to get them back.

So...I think what that points to is solving the problem by managing narrating rights, thereby controlling who gets to introduce the elements that refresh these pools into scenes? Hmm...but then you could wind up the same problem, as the guy who has been running over the other players takes his points and just buys the scene out from under the other players...

Maybe somesort of ownership as regards traits or Style Sheets, such that when

someone else

brings in something you have contributed, you get Waffle Points to buy narrative control? So if someone creates something that really jazzes the other players at the table, and that something gets brought up a lot, they get more opportunity to add things that other folks enjoy? Of course, the twinky player could always just introduce the plot equivalent of "the sky is blue", but I think that is really stretching things a touch.

A note on my attitude towards twinks: Most of my experience with the truly twinky comes from online RP, specifically MU* type games. Now, the worst examples of such twinking occur in the same games that have the best examples of players dealing with it. If someone pulls something like that, and the majority of the folks in the scene are against it, it simply doesn't happen. So how do people play "powerful" characters? Credibility. The players who contribute interesting things to a scene that other people are able to play off of wind up with more slack in this department. Those who don't are simply ignored or reprimanded. Now, the negative reinforcement solution to that wouldn't be practical at the gaming table, and the other type of solution (the retcon) is something I want to keep far, far away from my game.

So, to sum up...

1) Looks like I'll be buying Dogs when Chase gets my card working again.
2) Anti-twink protections need installed. I'm aware of this, and need to figure out what sort to do.
3) The Anti-twink precautions can probably be incorporated into the Resource flow of the game. I think.

Thanks again for your commentary, Danny. It is always helpful to have someone who is not me looking at what I'm doing, as the things in my head don't always transfer properly to paper. I want to especially thank you for pointing out the min/maxing thing. Its been so long since I've played with people who gamed enough to think about min/maxing that I didn't really take it into consideration. Again, thank you for the feedback and commentary, and I look foward to seeing your response to full version of the rules...er, once I get them down pat.

Actually, I think they are all mostly done, or in my head and just waiting to be put down on paper. The anti-twinking issue and the "what to randomize with" bit are big things that are sticking out at me right now. That and examples...

Because you can never have enough studies of nameless tentacled horrors from mad universes,
Eric Bennett

[Eric Bennett]

Wow...so I just dug through a couple of reviews of Dogs to put together a rough sketch of the resolution mechanic, looking for what Danny was talking about. And the raise/see etc thing just sold me on what I am using for my randomizers. It is definitely going to be cards. I'll change the conflict bit around to base Min/Sig/Major successes off individual "rounds" within the overall conflict. I think this will be both more natural and place the escalation in the hand's of the players.


I am doing the first playtest tonight around 8 o' clock, so we'll see how this plays out, but what I am guessing is that doing this way will emphasize the tactical side of the Conflict system that I enjoyed (and that sparked me off on this path in the first place), remove the arbitrary nature of my Conflict levels and slow down the accrual of Karma a touch, and further one of my other big goals: accessibility. I'll post more on this when I get tonight's AP in.

Also, my rules fit on three pages. ^.^ I am quite woot at this point. I'll process this into a playtest level document after tonight's game.

For great justice,
Eric Bennett