[Expendable] Attributes and...Skills?

[greyorm]

"Expendable" was a Ronnies enty last year. Here's the PDF over at 1km1t, which is very Alpha at this point. Here's the Ronnies thread.

With the basic mechanics of Guilt and Innocence out of the way, I am turning towards the system of Attributes and Skills in the draft version of the game, based on consideration of Ron's comments about this subject in the original feedback thread.

I did not really want to do a Hero Wars-ish sort of "Define your character's Things He Gets To Roll", though as I began to consider it, I began to swing in that direction. Here's what I am thinking currently for that, in part: choose three things that define your character, some kind of occupation or talent or historically important moment. Assign X dice to those things (optimal number to be determined by playtesting).

When you roll and lose, you lose dice from whatever you rolled in proportion to the number of successes your opponent recieved against you. And I like that, because it is the basic system as it stands, as was written for the Ronnies, RIGHT NOW -- just without Attributes and Skills, and I can tack the current Innocence/Guilt mechanics on to that fairly easily.

At the same time, I don't like it because I created some very, very interesting mechanical things that line up with the original Attributes. I may just mash the above and the below together in some fashion, but this is where I am at right now: I have been thinking about what the players have their characters actually DO in play, and when considering that, one of my guiding principles -- "Only roll when something violent is going to happen" -- went out the window as I considered some various very cool options for play with Attribute use. (The guiding principle did not completely fall away, however; nearly all the additional rolls will still be related in some way in helping a character to do violence.)

Here's the text:

Attributes

Attributes allow you to affect the game's environment in various ways, from injuring your opponent, to altering the game environment. Attributes are rated in number of dice, from 1 to 5 and do not necessarily define your character's mental or physical abilities, though they may serve as a guideline.

You get to assign one attribute 1, one attribute 2, one attribute 3, one attribute 4 and one attribute 5 [ed: or something like this]. Any time you roll, one of these applies.

Movement: Getting away from stuff, running, used for withdrawal tactics and so forth. Roll to dodge and escape from conflicts.

Clarity: Keeps you from being confused, outtalked, outmaneuvered, and terrified. Roll to avoid environment penalties.

Tech: Your familiarity with technology, computers and computer systems, robots, weaponry, and jury-rigging solutions. Roll to gain or fix tech.

Smarts: The brainiac category; used for tactical planning and repeating sections of the Encyclopedia Galactica. Roll to state a fact about the game world.

Stamina: Strength, phyiscal wherewithal, overall buffness -- how much time you spent in the pen's weight room. Roll to injure others.

If you're paying close attention, you'll notice some interesting things about this. Clarity, Tech, and Smarts do not work like one would expect "Attributes" to work. They all let you affect the local environment of the game world -- they provide directoral power -- along with the number of dice a character ultimately has to work with.

Tech lets you, the player, literally CREATE helpful technology on the spot and then outfit your character with it: weapons, tracking systems, flamethrowers, alien plasma rifles, what have you. How the character actually gets the technology you roll for is up in the air: it is found, built, taken out of storage, etc. The point it, the player can try to get it when he needs it.

Smarts lets you CREATE facts, including Envrionment variables! That means entrances and exits, technological loopholes, planetary histories, the opponents' achille's heel, etc. Smarts are that point in films where a character makes a statement about something that no one knew until RIGHT THEN. It's the "We can get to the engine room faster if we take a shortcut through medical." and "If we turn on the force repulsors and reverse the polaric flow, there's a chance we can stabilize the core!" and "These things obviously come from a high gravity world rich in atmospheric carbon. They won't like fire...I mean, like, fire bad, fire REEEEAL bad."

Clarity is less like the other two "special" Attributes, but it is important in that it lets the player affect how much the environment affects the character. Clarity is for when things are exploding around you and the airlock door is venting all your atmosphere into deep space, asking how cool you stay? Are you screaming, "It's game over, man! Game over!" or are you the one blinking the sweat out of your eyes while you line up a shot with your carbide rifle? That's Clarity.

Mechanically, for all of these, successes just create mechanical bonuses or penalties, attached to whatever Color happens to define or contain that particular set of modifiers (be it a gun, an air shaft, an allergen, etc). Rolling carries with it the chance of failure and the chance of your score's reduction. The more control over the story you want, the more you have to be willing to gamble to get it, and slowly run out of resources until you're down to fighting off the Hive Queen with a plumber's wrench while the ship decompresses around you.

I like those three, really, a lot. Of course, since the game is about running and shooting -- that's the source material -- I still needed central mechanics for...running and shooting. As such, there is the interplay between Movement and Stamina: pure combat stats. You get to choose which one to roll in any Conflict, try to run, or stay and fight? In the former case, successfully winning a roll builds up Movement that lets you get away or keep someone else from getting away -- though you don't get to do any damage to your opponent -- while in the latter case, you get to try to injure your opponent (of course, sometimes there might not be anywhere to run).

A successful Movement conflict, I think, will allow you to roll any of the above three as well. It will reset your ability to do any of those right there in the fight -- find a new weapon, remember some weakness or escape route, (re)deal with the environment -- when normally such things must be rolled before the fight starts. Representative of recentering oneself, tactical movement, etc.

(Irrelevant tangent: hrm, a dial to set the amount of Action Hero Film? So that Movement could be used for insane things like running up walls and other such over-the-top physical stunts?)

Of course, this is becoming way tactical, and I don't know that I should go that direction. I'm torn. Too much game in my premise? Then again...Riddle of Steel, so. Thus, my question: is it too much, would I be served better in reaching the goals for this game already outlined by scaling back the tactical combat here and moving back towards the simpler system with fewer dice-play options? In this particular case, does anyone foresee this stuff overshadowing the premise and the meaty moral/choice issues?

A better question: does it seem like this stuff is drifting me away from the thematic content of the original Ronnies entry and towards something else entirely? Any of you designers out there have any experience with this sort of situation you would be willing to share? I'm not looking for "you should do THIS", I am looking for "we did THIS, and here's what happened to us, and why".

Finally, I should note that Skills have been bugging me since Ron criticized them, because I wanted them to do SOMETHING, to help define characters a little better, but Ron is right that in the current structure the idea Skills are rather superfluous and thus unnecessary. I am currently waffling on dropping the idea that Skills define how many times you can call for an ItS during the game. It is clunky and does nothing but add more overhead given that there was already a natural limit to ItS in the form of the penalties caused by its use. To decide on this, I really need to do some playtesting of Expendable to see how the chips fall mechanically. Right now, that playtest will happen with with Skills removed from the game, and no limit to the number of times ItS can be called for except those incurred by the cumulative penalty per Increase in each Conflict.

So, does anyone see any obvious problems with the proposed mechanics that I have missed? Any questions about how things should work in play that are not being clearly communicated by me?

[Dav]

You know me and my hatred of skill lists (some exceptions, but, in general).  Anyway, I must say this: I like it, I get it, I even enjoy all living hell from it... except Tech.  I'm shaky on tech.  Possibly because I read tech and realize it is about getting dirty and stuff, and I'm not on that boat, but also because it seems this odd lil tack-on.  What I mean by that is that Tech, in general, will be used to injure others, escape conflict, avoid environmental penalties, or what-have-you.  Tech seems just a cosmetic vehicle for the other Attributes.  I'd suggest rolling Tech into the other Attributes.  I mean, if I can state a fact about the game world, that could easily be something about the Tech all about me -- or I could use that as my description for how I go about using the other attributes.

That's all.

Dav

[Sydney Freedberg]

I very much like the explicit conception of "Tech" and "Smarts"* being things your character uses to let you as player narrate advantageous facts into existence. I'd actually suggest that "Tech" and "Smarts" would do better compounded into a single stat that lets you invent situational modifiers -- with exactly what the situational modifier is (be it equipment for you, weaknesses for enemies, or convenient terrain) being defined by a descriptor, e.g. "tech money," "ex-military," "human encyclopedia," "Sherlock Holmes," whatever.

Whether I say "my character knows there's a shortcut through the medlab because he's worked there!" or "my character deduces there must be a shortcut through the medlab beacuse all these ships are designed that way" is just pure Color; likewise "the aliens must be vulnerable to fire - lucky I found a blowtorch!" vs. "I've built a blowtorch out of my cigarette lighter -- lucky the aliens are vulnerable to fire!"

I am also very pleased by the concept of "Clarity" as, basically, your psychological armor class.

[greyorm]

Those are very good points, thank you both for making them. Not sure what I will end up deciding on that score -- whether or not to drop Tech and just meld it into the other Attributes -- but it has given me something to seriously think about.

(BTW, a tangent for your amusement: Tech actually came before I had the idea for the other stats; I developed the idea of what Smarts and Clarity could do from it!)

The only points against taking the advice right now are that Tech is used to for equipment. Equipment is basically a number of dice that modify various rolls (mostly combat). Equipment can also take damage instead of you if you declare Fallout on it, or by being targeted by someone else's attack (ie: "I kick the gun out of Tenson's hands! That should even the odds!").

Given those properties, it would seem I need a way to measure and control the gain and loss of it that rolling it into the other stats may not allow. On the other hand, it may not be a problem at all.

The second argument against is that a character might be smart or cunning, but have no ability with or easy access to technology (but that is a fairly weak argument, even to me).

It might be better to move the current mechanical bits of Tech into Smarts, but keep the character element as a spendable Resource rather than an ability. Not quite certain how I might make that work, though.

Well, just me thinking out loud. Again, thanks for pointing this out, guys! I'm going to keep my mental processes churning away on this.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Tech = equipment, gotcha.

The thing is, both in fiction and in real life, your ability to start with cool equipment has very little to do with your ability to introduce new equipment at the exact right time:
- The Marines from Aliens are nearly pure example of the former: They begin the "game" with world-beating hardware, but it's a non-renewable resource and they manage to lose, break, or expend almost all of it before the movie's halfway done.
- Macgyver from the unwatchable TV show of the same name is a nearly pure example of the latter: He almost never shows up with any cool stuff in hand, but somehow he manages to improvize the exact right thing at the crucial moment. Doctor Who is
- Scottie, LaForge, & other Star Trek engineers are good examples of characters with high scores in both: They start every story with amazing stuff, but it usually gets taken away by omnipotent godlike aliens/blocked by a form of radiation like any we've ever seen before; but then they can also produce new amazing stuff exactly suited to the current problem in the last 15 minutes of the episode.

More important, the first kind of tech is "hey, somebody gave me this": It doesn't say much about the character. The second kind of tech is "look what I did!": It totally says something about the character (inventive, adaptable, etc.).

So it might be fun to differentiate these: Give characters a pool of points to buy non-renewable ("ablative") tech at the beginning of the scenario, but also give them a stat they can roll to manifest new tech as needed -- which, mechanically, could be just a different way of describing the same "pull rabbit out of hat" ability as "hey, I know where that door leads!" (= "having downloaded the schematics from the computer, I know where that door leads!") or "hey, these aliens must be allergic to sugar!" (= "I just brewed up a special alien-poisoning powder!")

[greyorm]

Yes! Precisely. You've pinned down exactly what I've been struggling with regarding the Equipment rules. Your starting Equipment was never meant to indicate your technical expertise: it's what you've been given/start out with, while Tech is representative of how much control over character add-ons you have in-game (as with your examples above). In fact, that's the difference I've been trying to verbalize/rationalize between Smarts and Tech. Smarts is environmental, while Tech is personal.

I also did not yet have a way to determine what a character recieved as starting equipment, but as I was writing the above I thought of this: perhaps standardized equipment packages based on Skill choice? That is, choose a particular skill and get a particular piece of standard equipment. That way, your starting equipment is based on the reason you were picked for this particular mission given your skills. Yeah, I like that. Beyond that, "Skills" have no mechanical effect, they're just narrative Color.

Bam. Cool. Thanks!

[Sydney Freedberg]

That does sound good. It's a big step beyond my suggestion, which is excellent and the entire point of such discussion. I like this whole dynamic of "A says something smart, which stimulates B to say something even smarter, which triggers A to say something still smarter yet," upwards and around indefinitely. The Forge as a forum and Forge-influenced games both seem to be awfully good at facillitating that collaborative cycle.

[greyorm]

That does sound good. It's a big step beyond my suggestion, which is excellent and the entire point of such discussion. I like this whole dynamic of "A says something smart, which stimulates B to say something even smarter, which triggers A to say something still smarter yet," upwards and around indefinitely. The Forge as a forum and Forge-influenced games both seem to be awfully good at facillitating that collaborative cycle.

I quote for truth! And to mention I am very happy to see that cycle working here with regards to Expendable. Everyone has provided excellent feedback; I know that collaborative cycle we have really helps me as a designer, spurs me forward and encourages me to participate in giving feedback to others regarding their designs.