[Crucible] Tournament Fighting! Help with Advancement?

[WiredNavi]

Hello, all.  Much as I know I should be finishing up Echoes (my current project), another one has sorta taken hold of me.  I'm calling it Crucible for now, which is probably taken already so I'll have to change it eventually.

The basic gist is:  There's a whole bunch of people who are, formally or informally, involved in an important fighting tournament, ala Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, or any other tournament fighting game you care to name.  Whether it's a formal or informal tournament is totally irrelevant - they could simply all be chasing after the same Macguffin and fighting each other along the way.  The point is, they all have a driving need, for different reasons, to win the tournament, defeat or kill one or more of the other characters, prove their style superior, etc.  Their backstories should be deeply interwoven in emotionally-charged ways.  I'm envisioning a crazy web of betrayal, vengeance, and honor something like the stuff Shreyas was doing with his Wuxia patterns and the new Snow From Korea.  (This is usually how the storyline of these games go; someone's always killed someone else's dad, and someone else is trying to steal someone else's girlfriend or achieve ultimate power or something.)

Quite possibly there will be no central GM and players will control multiple characters. Each session, two characters will be destined for a showdown, and the other characters will be secondary characters that session.  I'm envisioning the actual showdown itself as something which happens at the end of each session (like the high point of a TV episode), with a crunchy tactical combat very reminiscent of fighting games, with lots of style-assuming and special-technique-using.  That part isn't so hard to figure out - or at least is hard in a different way.  Right now I'm concerned with the heart of the system, which is the XP system.

Here's how it goes:
Players always have a list of three things they want their character to purchase (attribute upgrades, new techniques, etc.) which cost varying amounts depending on how good they are.
Characters have Relationships - ideas or people that they're invested in, like 'My Wife', 'Myself', 'Avenging my Father's Death', or 'The Superiority Of My Kung-Fu School'.
They also have three relevant attributes: Drive (starts at 0), Pressure (starts at 0), Discipline (purchased as an attribute, probably an expensive one.)
Whenever a Relationship is threatened, that character gets a point of Pressure.  Threatening the target of a relationship is threatening the relationship; if you try to kill my wife, it's the same mechanically as trying to steal her from me.
When Pressure is greater than the total of Discipline and Drive, the character starts to take penalties because they're really stressed out.
A player can roll their character's Drive against their Pressure (in some as-yet-undetermined manner) to attempt to cancel them out.  Whenever they do this, they get an Inspiration with a value equal to the amount of Pressure cancelled out.  An Inspiration can be spent to purchase one thing from their list for their character; the bigger the Inspiration, the better the thing they can purchase.  The Inspiration has to be spent all together on one thing, though; there's no saving up the extra inspiration.  If you want to get the secret ultimate technique, you've got to cancel out an awful lot of Pressure all at once.

The whole point of this is to encourage players to stoke their characters up, get them into ridiculous, untenable, threatening situations and build up as much pressure on them as possible, which in turn awakens the character's inner potential, making them more powerful when they explode and try to kill each other.  However, there's some things I haven't worked out:

- How do players get Drive?  I'm thinking encouragement from other characters, sort of like IC fan mail in PTA or gift dice in TSoY, but how that would work I don't know...
- How should these Relationships be dealt with mechanically?  Should there just be a set number?
- How do I set up things at the start of the game so that the characters have reasons to put lots of pressure on each other, and/or so that some of each characters' Relationships depend on their success in the tournament?

Any comments are welcome, and not just on those questions.

[neko ewen]

Sounds very neat, plus it goes into one of my favorite genres in an interesting way. ^_^

The major thing with fighting tournaments (both in RPGs and in anime/manga/whatever) is that they're time-consuming and they leave a lot of players/characters out of the action at a time. In the Mahou Sensei Negima manga they had a fighting tournament that literally took up about 3 1/2 volumes in all, and in the Flame of Recca anime 2/3 of the entire series was a tournament, even when they barely showed any fightings not concerning the main characters. So my concern is that if the whole game is based around tournament fighting, it might be good to think in terms of giving the players whose characters aren't fighting a way to somehow be involved in some small way instead of sitting on the sidelines for however long it takes for a match to play out.

IMO there *definitely* needs to be something to make sure the PCs' Relationships interact in some way, doubly so if the game is going to be GM-less. Maybe for every Relationship a character has, another PC has to take some kind of hook so they'll figure into it somehow. If A wants to prove the superiority of Monkey Kung Fu, then B can volunteer to be out to settle his sifu's grudge against the Monkey Kung Fu school. Or maybe give them a strong mechanical incentive for doing so. OTOH players should have a reason for applying Pressure without a predetermined relationship/hook setup.

It would be kind of weird and metagame, but maybe Relationships could also work into how the tournament brackets are set up?

I'm trying to think in terms of melodramatic fighting anime and whatnot... The way you have Drive, Discipline, Pressure, and Inspiration working together fits extremely well. I'm drawing a blank on how to handle gaining Drive though; in the souce material the drive to suceed tends to come from a character's motivations and it explodes when they're backed into a corner, but that's kind of what Inspiration is for.

You alluded to other attributes and special techniques, so I'm curious what the rest of the system is going to be like, and how the parts will all fit together. I've only worked with fighting game stuff from a more "Gamist" approach (i.e., where the RPG rules are primarily about fighters trading blows in interesting ways).

[Keith]

Maybe characters could get Drive from interacting with their Relationships.  Their Relationships keep them going, and encourage them to further their own individual plots.  Maybe something along the lines of, you can buy "Tasks" for each Relationship.  Tasks are things you do to further the plot, interact, and gain more points.  Maybe a Task for a "my training" Relationship could be, "seek out an experienced teacher to learn from."  Or, "my brother" could give you the Task, "discover his killers".  Once you complete a Task, you get points to spend in Drive.

You could spend points to create a Task, with GM approval.  Essentially, you'd come up with your own plots, and the GM would just narrate them and flesh them out.

For Relationships - Dogs in the Vineyard has a great Relationship system.  If you haven't played, what happens is, at character creation, you get a whole heap of dice to put towards Relationships.  As you encounter people or things in the game, you can assign your Relationship dice to them.  You get to roll those dice when the conflict involves your Relationship some how.  Following that line of thinking, maybe when you come across someone or something that impacts your character's personal plot, you can buy that person or thing as a new Relationship.  This would help weave and connect the players, when they end up spending dice on the same Relationships - maybe something special could happen if they do that, such as being able to work together to appease that Relationship's Task (if implemented!)

The Relationship itself would provide bonuses based off your, well, relationship with them - if you're on good terms with it, if you're taking care of it.  Bonuses or penalties, in that regard.

Hope this helps!

[WiredNavi]

Thanks, guys!

Neko - As far as actual fighting mechanics goes, they'll probably be Gamist.  I suspect there will be some fighting Attributes (Speed, Power, etc.) which will determine how many dice and of what kind you roll per exchange.  An exchange is a full-on exchange of blows, and can possibly be very involved and end up with neither or both characters hurt, probably in some way involving cancelling opposing dice with your own.  I haven't gotten very far with any of this; my vague plans include having Styles which you can switch between exchanges.  There will be basic maneuvers (Strike, Maneuver, Defend, Dodge, etc.) which will be fairly simplistic and Techniques which each character purchases which are more involved and will probably have a BESM- or Champions-like purchasing system, where you can purchase modifiers (increased accuracy, penetration, weird chi effects, whatever) at increasing cost per modifier the higher they're stacked on a particular Technique.  So you could end up with the Flaming Monkey Fist Technique which was a Strike with the added 'Flaming', 'Quick' and 'Feint' positive modifiers and the 'Difficult' penalty modifier for a pretty expensive  and effective Technique which takes extra dice to activate.

I've also got amusing ideas for Settings.  Formal settings, like a fighting ring, wouldn't have any modifiers to combats, but Informal Settings would be things like 'On A Bridge', which would have the Precarious modifier (shared by the On A Cliff setting) which might favor some characters, Styles, or  fighting strategies.  Characters could make Maneuver rolls in some of those settings to change the setting.  For instance, a good (or potentially very bad) Maneuver could change On A Bridge to In A River.

I am absolutely determined to have the characters who aren't currently fighting be important to the game every session, doing their own things and potentially gaining Drive and Pressure.  It's just that when they're not the designated fighers for that session, they're secondary characters.   They've got their own things going on but the focus of the session is the characters who're going to be fighting at the end, like PTA's spotlight characters.  Exactly how to accomplish this is a good question, but I'm working on it.

Keith - I like the idea of characters being able to draw Drive from their Relationship whenever it supports them.  That's very cool.  And putting some DitVesque on the fly relationship forming stuff is a good idea, but I suspect I may have to cap the number of Relationships a character can have (or maybe cap the active relationships; you can have lots of them, but each session the plot is only really going to care about three or four of them...)  And the idea of Relationships actually giving a character their Goals or Tasks is excellent... especially if there was some way to have other characters Relationships involved.  Hmm... I kinda like the idea of having the task a particular Relationship gives be determined by another player, who must make it related to one of their character's Relationships.