[Lendrhald] A system to reward players, not characters?

[David Berg]

"A GM helping out players that he liked" is a "system to incentivize player behaviors,"

Here, invisibility is a goal in itself (to facilitate the impression of an independent world).  It is this invisibility of the "GM helps players he likes" system, not its informality, that makes this "not an incentive" in my eyes.

If the internal consistency of your world is critically important to you, and you want to encourage people playing your game to really get into the gritty details of that world . . . then you need to structure how your world works in some way, or else no one but you personally is ever going to be able to run the game properly.

Yeah, I definitely worry about that.  I'm still hoping that as I continue to clarify various aspects of my game, someone can throw me some structure suggestions that I don't have to discard for immersion-related reasons.  Sydney, did my above response to your questions about the session give you any ideas?  Or at least help whittle down a sense of what directions might be possible to pursue?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Hello, Dave. Sorry to go blank on you for a week - and I'm not sure even now that I have anything brilliant to say.

What worries me is that a lot of the problems you're describing, and even some of the fixes, sound painfully familiar: the guy who wants to know what "the mission" is and feels lost because the GM won't hand it to him, people getting bored with in-character logistical planning, even your feeling compelled to shortcut the preliminaries by having two important NPCs in the same place so the players don't have to roleplay out their whole "this is why you should help us" speech twice. The fact that "the players enjoyed slipping uppers to drunks" is also a potential warning sign, actually: It seems contrary to the tone you're trying to set, a little bit of absurdist mischief, and when players take surprising glee in that kind of thing, it's often because they're frustrated and feel impotent and unable to affect the course of the game in more heroic ways. Likewise, your complaint that the players just want to kick ass and probably aren't suited for this kind of game may well be true, but it's the standard complaint of every GM who feels s/he's not getting through. To make everything harder for yourself, you're very, very committed to people only speaking in character, which whatever its benefits for immersion carries the cost of slowing everything down as players mentally "translate" what they want to say into in-game terms and struggle to find ways of expressing meta-game concerns (e.g. "I'm bored now") at all.

Plus, for a game in which your stated objective is to make the world feel real, the principal incentive-reward cycle you want to get going is for players to really, really care how your world "really works" so they can be more effective in it, and to make the GM's rewarding them for that "invisible" is self-defeating: You may avoid breaking immersion now, but you're missing a chance to encourage the players to get more invested and have more immersion later.

I'm not a big fan of immersion, so you and I are going to have different aesthetic and therefore design takes on this, but I worry that you're trying mainly to encourage immersion (what I'd prefer to think of, more broadly, as players being excited about and invested in your fictional world) by negative measures to discourage breaking immersion -- principally by not letting people talk out of character and by not revealing certain things about how the game works. Your positive measures to encourage being immersed in the first place  appear to be limited to reminding them of mundane details like bad boots, cold weather, and empty stomachs, which is great so far as it goes but hardly enough to get profound emotional commitment from your players. So, naturally, there's a fair amount of boredom, floundering, and "what do we do next, Dave?" "Well, I can't just tell you, but your characters could do [X, Y, Z]." "Uh, okay, we do X." "Okay, [mildly interesting stuff happens]." "Uh, now what?" "I can't just tell you, but..." Repeat ad infinitum.

You have to earn your players' interest first. They have to be immersed before you have to worry about breaking immersion. Right now, their interest is iffy and their immersion... well, I bet you there isn't immersion for most of them, most of the time. I'm afraid -- I don't know, but I suspect -- that you're in the position of a car designer working feverishly on anti-lock brakes, airbags, and an impact-resistant chassis without ever realizing that your engine has too few horsepower to move the car more than 5 mph. You gotta rev up that motor first.

Now, there are plenty of ways to spike player interest in a horror/adventure game without breaking immersion (although, as I said, I think you're sacrificing a lot of potential high-quality, highly invested immersion in the future for the sake of preserving low-quality, minimally invested immersion now). The time-honored one is to throw hideous freakin' monsters at the player-characters that want to eat their damn eyeballs -- unless, of course, your combat system is slow and clunky, in which case so long immersion again. Another, subtler method is the slow creep of unsettling details as your characters walk deeper and deeper in the woods/caves/ruined castle, leading to the eyeball-eaters in due course. Another, even tricker method is to do all your standard "talk to this official, work out these logistics" discussions, but to have the NPCs suddenly clam up when the players mention certain topics, or insist on certain measures being taken without offering any justification -- "Okay, well, the shortest route is along this road by the ruins of... " "No! Do not say that name!" "Uh, okay, but this road..." "No! We must take the other road!" "Uh, but it's twice as long and goes through enemy territory and is subject to frequent rockslides and..." "We must take that road! Do not speak of the other again!" "Okay, but what's wrong with the shorter road by the ruins?" "Oh, nothing. Really. More tea?"

But to do the logistical discussion step-by-step in character, or to do the whole speech to convince the NPC to help you without any dramatic condensation, is just a goddamn waste of everybody's time. That's not immersion. That's tedium. Talking in character doesn't mean you're immersed if you're thinking about what you ate last night, or whether you'll make it home in time for that cool TV show; talking out of character doesn't mean you're not immersed if fiber of your imagination is vividly intent on the fate of your fictional characters.

[David Berg]

Sydney's logic sounds sensible to me, but with one major caveat: it depends on who's playing.  I'm not trying to turn Lendrhald into a game that'll satisfy everyone who likes any kind of dark, realistic fantasy; but rather, one that will best serve those who agree with me and my co-designer about a certain type of experience they'd like to have (see bulleted list below).

An Extreme Style of Play

My co-designer has conceived of Lendrhald not as a game that runs itself, nor as a game that the GM runs "for" the players, but rather as a game where the players decide what they want to experience, and then the game and GM allow them to have that experience in as real a way as possible (short of hallucinogens and time machines).

In a game that works that way, it generally benefits the characters to investigate what they encounter.  Knowing how a bureaucracy or monster works helps you decide on the most effective way to bribe or kill it.

It's not so much a matter of being immersed in "the world Dave made up, as Dave hopes you'd encounter it, focusing on Dave's favorite bits" -- it's more a matter of being immersed in the world your character confronts, what he sees, hears and feels, as a result of the choices he makes.  If the players choose to pursue my meta-plot secrets, that experience should be convincing and vivid; if they choose to just cut down trees and build log cabins, that experience should be convincing and vivid too.

The world includes plenty of "doing something dangerous for money" opportunities, and my co-designer's games have focused on these, pitting his players' wits against various physical obstacles and nasty monsters.  They've all gotten the point that their GM is not going to "rig" anything, so if they want to avoid death, they'd better pay attention and proceed with caution.  The GM has kept absolutely everything that is invisible to the characters equally invisible to the players (separate conversations, dice roll target numbers, etc.).  As there's been no incentive to think out of game, the players haven't much.  As for talking out of game, the players are all pretty much playing themselves, so there's no difference in in-game vs out-of-game discussion as long as it's about in-game concerns.

My co-designer has almost no interest in passing Lendrhald on to other GMs and players, so none of his stylistic choices have been turned into formal rules systems.

Is That A Game?

Perhaps what this style of play boils down to in terms of a "game package" is a handful of adventure modules and a list of "immersion do's and don't's" based on what my co-designer has found to be successful.  All our world design material would become a sort of "reference almanac to assist GM trouble-shooting".

As for my own part, as a player I'm a huge fan of some major parts of this style of play, particularly:

• I like being able to really "lose myself" in an imaginary experience
• I like learning about medieval societies (especially fictional ones, as long as they "work")
• I like problem-solving
• I like the drama of facing situations and monsters without any safety net (GM contrivance), with success or failure often hinging on luck (combat die rolls)
• I like the responsibility of deciding what course to pursue, helping "author" the subject of play rather than simply following the one lead
  

However, as a GM and designer, I'd like to have my cake and eat it too.  The friends I game with want more guidance, less problem-solving, and aren't that motivated by immersion for its own sake.  Others out there who might like a lot about my setting will currently find little to latch onto and get them stoked about playing.  So, if I can keep the game as effective as it currently is at satisfying some things I like, and at the same time make it more accessible to a wider variety of temperaments, I'd like to.

Perhaps that's simply impossible.  Most suggestions I've received to date involve some amount of "don't worry about visible contrivance, in small enough doses it's a worthy sacrifice to make for the sake of making the game more fun."  Which is clearly true for some players, possibly even most players.  But look at my list above of the qualities that make Lendrhald fun (and different than other games) for me, and see how vital a lack of visible contrivance is to all of them.

I think Sydney's points about grabbing player interest are extremely important, but the solutions that come to my mind are all informal social contract matters:

The players should find common ground on what interests them.  They should tell the GM, "When given options, the party will usually choose to pursue X kind of thing."  The GM should focus his prep work on various types of X.  And, of course, Everyone should decide whether or not Lendrhald is well-suited to what they want to play.  I think this has been the key ingredient missing from my game.

As a game designer, the best I can think to do on this front is to include with my game package "some tips for having a fun multi-player gaming experience", and a "what Lendrhald is/isn't suited for" disclaimer.

I'm still hoping that someone on the Forge will think of some systems that have potential to help me "have my cake and eat it too", and that further descriptions of my game will facilitate this.  However, I'm aware that I've greatly restricted the available options... I'm starting to lean toward creating the "module + suggestions + reference" package I described above, accepting that the audience for this is a niche within a niche within a niche, and then moving on to another project.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Dave, you'd be surprised at how much of what you consider "informal social contract matters" irreproducibly unique to a given group of people can be formalized, systematized, and replicated by other people who've never met the original creators. I'm paraphrasing Vincent Baker here, but the only thing a rulebook can actually do is provide tools to create a better social contract. Conversely, a lot of what is most toxic in badly designed games is not the mechanics at all, but insidious "GM advice" that amounts to "ignore the rules to make the results be what you expect, lie to your players to preserve the illusion of GM omniscience, punish the character of any player who defies your preconceptions, and never, ever allow honest dialogue among player about what they really like or dislike" -- and unfortunately "immersion" is used as a club in all too many of these bully-GM games.

Now, mechanics certainly matter, and even if you do decide to piggyback on an existing system -- an entirely honorable and sensible approach -- you need to make sure it at least doesn't get in the way, and at best facillitates your goals. But most important, you want to try to figure out how to distill the process you, your co-creator, and your various players have used to communicate expectations and desires about the game, guide prep, and aim play at those particular things you find fun.

Excellent examples are the playtest draft of Matt Wilson's Galactic and the playtest draft of Vincent Baker's Afraid, as well as Joshua Bishop-Roby's Full Light, Full Steam and, in a different vein, Michael Miller's With Great Power.... Earlier, less strongly structured examples are Wilson's Prime Time Adventures and Ron Edwards's seminal Sorcerer. And my personal favorite, Tony Lower-Basch's Capes, takes a radically different tack by largely (though not entirely) dispensing with collective prep at all and instead setting up a system of interlocking incentives to guide players to the desired story-structures through a kind of Adams Smith-ian "invisible hand." (Too late for me to hunt links, but all of these are heavily referenced right here on the Forge as well as Googleable).

If you can systematize whatever you're already doing, on the fly, to encourage and integrate your players' creativity into a workable creative consensus, you're golden -- and there are games already out there that prove this "mysterious GM art" can be analyzed and taught.

[David Berg]

Dave, you'd be surprised at how much of what you consider "informal social contract matters" irreproducibly unique to a given group of people can be formalized, systematized, and replicated by other people who've never met the original creators.

I would be.  I know I'm long overdue to try playing some of the games you listed...

I'm paraphrasing Vincent Baker here, but the only thing a rulebook can actually do is provide tools to create a better social contract.

Can't it also provide tools to create a worse social contract?  A lot of the ideas I've been rejecting have struck me as not without merit, but simply as doing more harm than good -- immediately helping achieve something I want in a small way, but ultimately interfering in a larger way. 

This is why, for certain issues, I recently started thinking in terms of suggestions / GM advice ("Fred, please say that in character, I think we'll all stay better immersed in the fiction") as opposed to rewards systems ("Fred, for speaking out of character, a tree falls on your character; everyone, please stay immersed and react in-game as if this were a total fluke occurrence.").

Conversely, a lot of what is most toxic in badly designed games is not the mechanics at all, but insidious "GM advice" that amounts to "ignore the rules to make the results be what you expect, lie to your players to preserve the illusion of GM omniscience, punish the character of any player who defies your preconceptions, and never, ever allow honest dialogue among player about what they really like or dislike" -- and unfortunately "immersion" is used as a club in all too many of these bully-GM games.

Huh.  Interesting.  I've played games where the GMs have done such things, and I agree with you that those GM behaviors are undesirable, but I've never seen the GM act that way specifically because a rulebook told him to. 

For what it's worth, the "GM advice" I'd hand out would probably discourage "ignore the rules", discourage "punish characters based on your disposition toward players", attempt to render lying unnecessary, and briefly encourage honest dialogue in passing.

you want to try to figure out how to distill the process you, your co-creator, and your various players have used to communicate expectations and desires about the game, guide prep, and aim play at those particular things you find fun.
. . .
If you can systematize whatever you're already doing, on the fly, to encourage and integrate your players' creativity into a workable creative consensus, you're golden

I have been pushing my co-designer to help me think in this direction for a little while now, but each time he describes his process (which has worked somewhat better than mine), important facets seem to flat-out defy being turned into system.

Me: How do the players know that there's no safety net?
Him: They've played with me before and lost characters.
Me: What do you do when the players can't seem to pick a path to pursue?
Him: If there are any pressing concerns (such as money for next meal and night's sleep), I remind them.  Otherwise, they just have to make a decision.
Me: How do you guess what they'll want to do and prep accordingly?
Him: I've played with these guys for years, I know they like dungeon-crawls with physics problems.
Me: What if they choose to pursue something you hadn't anticipated?
Him: In any city that I'm running in, I have a good enough common-sense feel for how things work that I can wing it if I have to.  I usually have some rough maps and some names of important NPCs.
Me: How did you develop this "common-sense feel"?
Him: Through the research I did into actual history in the process of creating the game.
Me: Can you help me develop such a feel by explaining stuff to me?
Him: That'd take me forever.  Spend a week in a library.
Me: Uh...  So, anyway, if the PCs leave The Interesting Store in town and declare, "We're going next door!" you don't already know what's there?  You can just come up with something appropriate on the spot?
Him: Occasionally.  Usually, though, if I expect them to go to a store, then I'd probably define what's on either side of it and across the street from it beforehand.  And, beyond that, I'd think about what general types of places it would make sense for there to be in that area.
Me: That sounds like a lot of prep work!
Him: It is.

[charles ferguson]

Hi David,

I've read the thread so far with great interest--thanks. In your first post you said:

The system needs to do a satisfactory job governing action outcomes within the gameworld, but beyond that, I don't see a need for additional rewards, direct to the players.

Do you actually think there's anything lacking in your game? Anything you're looking to do better?

It might be productive to list these things, then to focus on whether or not there might be meta (or in-game) mechanisms to help with them.

Alternatively, it may turn out that you're actually happy with Lendrhald pretty much the way it is (happy days!). In that case any suggested changes are unlikely to give you much joy.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Can't it also provide tools to create a worse social contract?

Oh, boy, can it ever. As I said, a lot of that toxic stuff is buried in the "GM advice" sections. 

This is why, for certain issues, I recently started thinking in terms of suggestions / GM advice ("Fred, please say that in character, I think we'll all stay better immersed in the fiction") as opposed to rewards systems ("Fred, for speaking out of character, a tree falls on your character; everyone, please stay immersed and react in-game as if this were a total fluke occurrence.").

Heh. But of course reward and punishment can be a lot subtler than that -- and, most important, that "reward" and "punishment" only count in terms of the emotional response of the real people involved. What happens to their characters is only a means to that end, and often a "punishment" for the character -- loved ones kidnapped, enemies attacking -- can be a reward for the player, by making that player's story more exciting.

Generally, small, consistent, immediate incentives work a lot better than large, occasional, deferred incentives; and rewards work better than punishments (at least in a voluntary activity where you can't force people to stay...). So instead of "a tree drops on your character for speaking out of character," consider a reward mechanic where every time a player says something really cool in character, the GM -- or any other player -- can slip that player an "applause" token. Nobody has to say anything -- it's like musicians in an orchestra wiggling their feet to applaud each others' solos when their hands are full of instruments -- just slide the token over and everyone knows, "hey, that guy did something cool." Make the flipside of the rule be "you can't get an applause token for something you say out of character, even if the whole table cracks up laughing."

Once you've formalized these values, the tokens don't actually have to have any impact on the game mechanics. Sure, it'd be nice if you could trade them in for a re-roll or something, but because they're already a direct expression of social approval among the real people playing, it's not actually necessary for them to have any impact on the characters at all. Maybe at the end of a session, you see who has the biggest pile of applause tokens and name that player MVP for the night. Maybe you just point at the guy with the biggest pile and say, "Dude, you're cool. Your creativity was really on tonight. You really made things a lot of fun for the rest of us." -- because isn't that, ultimately, the thing we want to hear from our fellow roleplayers, the thing that "wow! your guy reached 20th level!" is just a coded way of saying?

I have been pushing my co-designer to help me think in this direction for a little while now, but each time he describes his process (which has worked somewhat better than mine), important facets seem to flat-out defy being turned into system.

Let me try. Apologies for the awkward line by line bit:

Me: How do the players know that there's no safety net?
Him: They've played with me before and lost characters.

All die rolls in the open -- not as a matter of "GM advice," but as a matter of hard-wired rules: if you hide rolls, you're breaking the rules. Then make the death and injury system blatantly brutal, with no safety nets, rerolls, or fudge factors. Then make it very clear in the character-creation section that (a) your guy can die any time, so better pump up {whatever scores are relevant}, and (b) your guy may still die any time, so why don't you make up a backup character right now, and here are the rules for rapidly bringing your new guy into play.

Not as good as personal experience of "dude, you killed my character!" but a pretty good stopgap.

Me: What do you do when the players can't seem to pick a path to pursue?
Him: If there are any pressing concerns (such as money for next meal and night's sleep), I remind them.  Otherwise, they just have to make a decision.

Make fatigue, hunger, exposure to the elements, etc. all into serious hardwired factors in the rules -- without being clunky and time-consuming, mind, just something like "okay, you guys are still talking? Well, I warned you: Now it's been another hour in the open, everyone take two points of frostbite damage -- yes, John, your heavy coat +1 soaks up one point of that, you only take one damage. Okay, now what do you guys want to do?"

Make it clear in the rules that if players just dither, the GM should not "pause time" indefinitely for them.

Me: How do you guess what they'll want to do and prep accordingly?
Him: I've played with these guys for years, I know they like dungeon-crawls with physics problems.

Make a "pitch" discussion, as in Prime Time Adventures, a required stage of setting up a new game. Instead of a GM saying, "hey, let's play, I have this great idea but I'm not going to tell you," explicitly require every player to request something s/he wants to see in the upcoming game -- maybe even give them points to allocate among their interests, points which turn into the GM's "budget" to "buy" world elements from a menu. Do all this before the first character is even named, entirely outside the part of the game that is played immersed.

Me: What if they choose to pursue something you hadn't anticipated?
Him: In any city that I'm running in, I have a good enough common-sense feel for how things work that I can wing it if I have to.  I usually have some rough maps and some names of important NPCs.
Me: How did you develop this "common-sense feel"?
Him: Through the research I did into actual history in the process of creating the game.
Me: Can you help me develop such a feel by explaining stuff to me?
Him: That'd take me forever.  Spend a week in a library.
Me: Uh...  So, anyway, if the PCs leave The Interesting Store in town and declare, "We're going next door!" you don't already know what's there?  You can just come up with something appropriate on the spot?
Him: Occasionally.  Usually, though, if I expect them to go to a store, then I'd probably define what's on either side of it and across the street from it beforehand.  And, beyond that, I'd think about what general types of places it would make sense for there to be in that area.

Look at Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard (of which Afraid is a derivative, more advanced in some ways but not complete). He has a page listing the typical things you'd expect to find in a small town in his setting, another page on the typical things you'd expect to find in a large town, and a quick way to randomize up stats for whole batches of nameless NPCs that you can then grab whenever you need more detail on some random person the characters run into.

Most innovative, Baker also lists all the cultural values and expectations of the setting -- men should do this, women should do that, the Mountain People and the Faithful and the corrupt Territorial Authority disagree on this. He then has an "adventure" generator, called "Town Creation," which consists of a multi-step process (off the top of my head, I think it goes: Pride, Injustice, False Doctrine, False Worship, Hate & Murder) the GM is required to run through during prep to say, "okay, one NPC violates one of these cultural values in a small way, so how does that affect one or two other NPCs in the community? How do those NPCs respond in a way that makes things worse? Okay, how does that affect a few more NPCs?" And so on until the whole place is about to collapse, unless the player-characters ride in and set things right.

Note that none of this is standard "worldbook" or "metaplot" stuff: Baker names only one town in the entire setting, the capital, and all he says about it is that there are four waterfalls in the hills above and the main temple is in the town; he names no NPCs at all. What he provides, instead, is a set of building blocks -- designed very carefully to fit together -- from which GMs can assemble appropriate bits of setting in quick pre-game prep and in-game on the fly.

Note this is also not "here's a Monster Manual and a blank map, go to it": That'd be the equivalent of dumping a lot of lego on the floor and saying "build something, anything, as long as it's really cool" -- choke time! Instead, it's as if Baker got you a set of Wild West legos (or space lego, or whatever) and handed you the box and said, "build whatever you want, all these pieces go together and suggest certain themes on which you can play infinite variations."

[David Berg]

Do you actually think there's anything lacking in your game? Anything you're looking to do better?

This is one of the disadvantages of being as verbose as I've been, and letting this thread get as long as it has: crucial points can get lost easily.  I think I addressed this issue in Reply #39, and the answer is:

4) What I'm looking to add to the current system pt1 (Immersion help)

Suppose a GM and some players sit down at the game table and agree that they're going for deep immersion in the Lendrhald setting.  If there is some way that a system can facilitate this, I'd like to do that.

5) What I'm looking to add to the current system pt2 (Dark Atmosphere help)

Is there some way to use system to reward/encourage players to "get" the feel I want?  How?

[David Berg]

Generally, small, consistent, immediate incentives work a lot better than large, occasional, deferred incentives; and rewards work better than punishments

Agreed.

consider a reward mechanic where every time a player says something really cool in character, the GM -- or any other player -- can slip that player an "applause" token. Nobody has to say anything -- it's like musicians in an orchestra wiggling their feet to applaud each others' solos when their hands are full of instruments -- just slide the token over and everyone knows, "hey, that guy did something cool." Make the flipside of the rule be "you can't get an applause token for something you say out of character, even if the whole table cracks up laughing."

I certainly don't see anything wrong with this.  My first thought, however, is,"Okay, if I'm motivated to get tokens, these tokens must be good for something..."

Once you've formalized these values, the tokens don't actually have to have any impact on the game mechanics. Sure, it'd be nice if you could trade them in for a re-roll or something, but because they're already a direct expression of social approval among the real people playing, it's not actually necessary for them to have any impact on the characters at all.

I think this nicely addresses the subject line of this thread.  This is kind of what I was thinking of when I started suggestion a distinction between "the roleplaying game" and "the metagaming game".  The problem I ran into with that line of thought was incentive effectiveness.  You have suggested "a direct expression of social approval", in which subtle smiles and nods are replaced with (or supplemented by) subtle passing of tokens.  Is the latter really more likely to encourage players to play a certain way than the former?

I think the answer could be "yes", but that would depend on the difference between "what you can approve of with a smile" (which is anything you like) and "what you can approve of with a token" (which is codified by the game).  And supposing there's a significant difference between what people like and what's codified (i.e, what the game wants them to like), aren't you kind of screwed right off the bat?

If the players appreciate something that serves the intended purpose of the game, great; but if they don't, is the existence of a set of guidelines for when you're supposed to hand out tokens going to change that?

Maybe at the end of a session, you see who has the biggest pile of applause tokens and name that player MVP for the night. Maybe you just point at the guy with the biggest pile and say, "Dude, you're cool.

Sounds good, but again, I worry about the incentive power there.  Maybe if being MVP gave you some sort of currency that you could use in a metagame fashion...  Something like, "Your character's backstory tie-ins move to the head of the queue."  No, the contrivance is too visible...

Ooh.  What about adjusting the Luck score?

The acceptable realm of metagame influence on Lendrhald play may be: things that are inherently arbitrary.  Wherever there is a reason why something should happen a certain way, that within-the-world logic must not be contradicted.  However, whenever world logic is mute on a subject (or impossibly complicated and conflicting), that is a time when players may spend / use their metagame earnings for their characters' benefit.

A possible system comes to mind:

The players (except for the GM) start each session with 5 "Fortune" tokens.  The rules list a few specific types of player accomplishments, which should be rewarded by one token from every other player.  Differences of opinion (Player A gives Player C a token, but Player B doesn't) are not debated during play, but are briefly jotted down by the GM.

At the end of the session, the GM reminds the players of some differences of opinion, with the option for more giving away of tokens (no takebacks, though).  So, Player A gets to tell Player B why he thinks he should give Player C another token, with the GM helping interpret the rules.

After all final token redistribution, the player with the most tokens is awarded a Fortune Point, i.e. a character-building point which must be spent on increasing his Luck score.

The Luck score determines how favorably arbitrary determinations come out for the character, and a point of Luck may be permanently sacrificed at any time to change a die roll (e.g. a failed Parry or Climb check that got you eviscerated or crushed).  Luck isn't purely positive; characters with below-average Luck will tend to have things go against them.

Now for the hard part:

Types of player accomplishments that deserve a Fortune token
- Convincingly portraying a significant emotion in-game (especially fear/horror)
- Convincingly portraying traits that are appropriate to both his character and the world (accent, gender attitudes, dislike of latrines, etc.)
- Coming up with an idea that winds up helping the party on their current mission
- Coming up with something to do that turns out to be fun for everyone
- Staying in-character for an entire session (minus food and bathroom breaks)
- Asking questions of the GM that wind up helping other players engage more with the world
- Keeping track of things the characters need to keep track of, such as food, money, clothing, the date, travel times, mapping, condition of gear, light sources, what they wipe their asses with, etc.

If the GM is the authority on the game and "gets it" better than his players, it might make some sense for him to be the one handing out tokens.  That might be a more consistent way to incentivize certain behaviors.  On the other hand, I think letting the players share resources would be more fun and positive, and eliminate "You just like the way he roleplays better than the way I roleplay!" bitterness toward the GM.

All die rolls in the open -- not as a matter of "GM advice," but as a matter of hard-wired rules: if you hide rolls, you're breaking the rules.

Well, it's nice to demonstrate to the players that the GM isn't fudging things.  However, it's also nice to discourage the players from thinking about combat situations in terms of numbers.  Two different models:

My game:
GM: You want to attack the lizard?  Roll to hit.  What's your weapon skill?
Player: 3.
GM: Okay, you need a 9.
Player: So its weapon skill is 5?!
GM: It's hard to hit.  It moves fast.
Player: Ah, so skill 4, plus an Agility bonus.
GM: Just roll.  It needs a 5 to hit you (rolls dice right in front of player).
(Both PC and lizard land hits.  Player and GM then roll location.  Player hits head, lizard hits torso.)
GM: Okay, you needed a 9, you rolled 11, that's a 4-point wound to the head.  The lizard rolls toughness... (rolls 5 dice)
Player: It has a Toughness of 5?!
GM: Yep.  Okay, looks like it soaks the Shock.  Your turn.  Is your torso armored?
Player: Yes.  With leather.
GM: Okay, roll your armor's check vs. an Edged weapon.
Player: Lemme see... okay, 3 dice, difficulty 5... three 5s!  Yes!
GM: Okay, it needed a 5 to hit, it rolled a 5, that's 3 damage.  Your 3 successes cancel it entirely.

My co-designer's game:
GM: You want to attack the lizard?  Roll your to-hit and location dice and leave them on the table.
Player: (rolls)  Nice, a 9, to the head!
GM: (ignores player, makes some roles behind GM screen, jots a few things down, eventually looks over at player's dice, jots a few more things)  Okay, you hit it in the head nice and solid.  It's bleeding, but still standing.  It hits your torso hard, you feel it, but your armor takes it.

Then make the death and injury system blatantly brutal, with no safety nets, rerolls, or fudge factors.

Done.  Hopefully the Luck mechanism doesn't sabotage that...

Then make it very clear in the character-creation section that (a) your guy can die any time, so better pump up {whatever scores are relevant}

Done.

(b) your guy may still die any time, so why don't you make up a backup character right now, and here are the rules for rapidly bringing your new guy into play.

Neat idea, I like it.

Make fatigue, hunger, exposure to the elements, etc. all into serious hardwired factors in the rules

I've been working on a mechanism for this, and here's my current idea:

All characters have an Energy pool.  Normal Energy is 100 -- well fed, well rested, not sick, not injured.  The GM has guidelines for how much certain things diminish this pool.  Missing a meal drops you 10, getting only 3 hours of sleep drops you 20, spending a day in a harsh climate drops you 5, each round of combat drops you 5, limping out of a fight with 3 levels of Shock damage drops you an additional 15, etc. 

When your Energy reaches 10, you get penalties to most actions.

When your Energy reaches 0, you collapse.  Depending on why you collapsed, you may be assumed to be on the brink of starvation, or you may just need sleep.

Energy can also be spent deliberately: "I'm going to use maximum exertion to make sure I successfully climb this cliff / land this blow."  20 points will allow you to dodge/parry a hit you would have otherwise taken.  10 points will give you a +1 bonus to a physical Skill check (or combat action?).

something like "okay, you guys are still talking? Well, I warned you: Now it's been another hour in the open, everyone take two points of frostbite damage -- yes, John, your heavy coat +1 soaks up one point of that, you only take one damage. Okay, now what do you guys want to do?"

Make it clear in the rules that if players just dither, the GM should not "pause time" indefinitely for them.

The main reason I can think of why players want to pause time is so they can discuss something quickly, as themselves, resolve a dispute, and then go back into the game and say either:
a) we're returning to play just after our characters resolved the issue that we players just resolved out-of-game, or
b) we're returning to play right where we stopped, and will now proceed to roleplay a quick exchange that accomplishes what our out-of-game discussion accomplished

Personally, my preference would be:
c) discuss everything in game, as your characters

And, to supplement that:
d) create a character through which you can express yourself easily and quickly

But maybe that's too restrictive (some players may want to run characters with odd accents / diction)?  If so, I guess (a) and (b) should be allowed for, and your suggestion about "time is passing in-game, guys, hurry up" might demarcate the line where the potential for (b) is lost and (a) becomes a reasonable assumption.  This still doesn't sound like a system to me, just advice to inform the GM's judgment call on when to prod.

Make a "pitch" discussion, as in Prime Time Adventures, a required stage of setting up a new game. Instead of a GM saying, "hey, let's play, I have this great idea but I'm not going to tell you," explicitly require every player to request something s/he wants to see in the upcoming game

To avoid contrivance down the line, this process would have to avoid any high levels of specificity.  But yeah, I intended to recommend player input... and I guess there's no harm in making that discussion "a required stage".

maybe even give them points to allocate among their interests, points which turn into the GM's "budget" to "buy" world elements from a menu.

Letting the GM know what the players want is good...  Helping the GM pick/generate some Lendrhald-appropriate material to give the players what they want is good...  Are finite resources good?  I can't see that serving any purpose beyond telling the GM, "You've probably picked/generated enough material now, you can stop."

Do all this before the first character is even named, entirely outside the part of the game that is played immersed.

Definitely.

Look at Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard (of which Afraid is a derivative, more advanced in some ways but not complete). He has a page listing the typical things you'd expect to find in a small town in his setting, another page on the typical things you'd expect to find in a large town, and a quick way to randomize up stats for whole batches of nameless NPCs . . . cultural values and expectations of the setting . . . an "adventure" generator . . . a set of building blocks -- designed very carefully to fit together -- from which GMs can assemble appropriate bits of setting in quick pre-game prep and in-game on the fly . . . "build whatever you want, all these pieces go together and suggest certain themes on which you can play infinite variations."

That's exactly what I'm hoping to create.  I'll check out that game and see how much I think Baker's tools are useful and imitable in Lendrhald.  I've played plenty of games that list cultural values and provide roll-on tables, but I've never gotten much mileage out of them.  Perhaps the central issue here is book design and ease of reference.

[Sydney Freedberg]

The central issue with Vincent Baker's "Town Creation" rules is that they're not just roll-on tables to give you disconnected elements: They're an interlocking that generates dynamically unstable situations -- situations that cannot stay still, that have to resolve somehow, and into which the player-characters -- who are dynamically unstable themselves, right? -- are thrown, because all PCs in the setting are defined as being part of a certain order of vigilante gunslinger-exorcists.

Now, I know you want a game where  "they choose to just cut down trees and build log cabins [and] that experience should be convincing and vivid too" -- but why? I mean, would you want to play that game? I'd be bored.

So you want character creation that creates characters who are driven to get entangled in horrific situations -- either it's their job, as in Baker's Dogs, or they've had some traumatic personal experience they want to get to the bottom of, as in Stolze & Tynes's Unknown Armies (cited earlier) or, I understand, Conspiracy of Shadows, or they live in a place that keeps on gettin' frickin' attacked, or ideally some combination of all three.

Then you want situation creation: in other words, you want a system for designing adventures that is every bit as tight, formalized, and step-by-step as traditional character generation. That's an area where most traditional RPGs, frankly, fall flat: "Oh, here's 10 pages of fiction and 30 pages of bizarre place names, NPCs, and backstory, you pick something, you're the freakin' GM."

And you want your dynamically unstable characters to snap tightly into the dynamically unstable situation. If your characters all have backstories like "the cruel nobles of my native province stole my father's land, ravished my sister, and drove me into exile," you give them demon-possessed nobles who oppression will destroy the realm if they are not stopped, not two peasant farmwives cursing each others' cattle. If your characters all have backstories like "I came from a small, isolated village where the ever-present menace of the dark forest slowly drove my mother mad, causing her to poison my father and sisters," then you don't give them the nobles, you give them the hex-casting farmwives, whose escalating feud will drag the whole village down into madness, crop failure, and cannibalism if they're not stopped.

Sure, your player-characters presumably wander through various villages where there's nothing wrong, and feudal domains where the lords are just and kind. Fast-forward through that. Real-life cops and doctors go weeks at a time without seeing a dead body, but TV shows about cops and doctors -- very realistic shows included -- focus on the days when somebody does risk death.


On a separate note, you'd be surprised how powerfully explicit guidance about what behaviors are good or bad can affect players, even if there's no game-mechanical bonus (e.g. "applause tokens" you can't trade in for anything). Every functional individual enjoys a wide range of different things and learns to do only a few of them at any given time in a particular activity: The same person can go to his kid's music rehearsal and clap politely, then go to the football game the next day and hoot and holler, then go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and yell jokes and throw things at the screen, then go to a regular movie and angrily hush anyone who even asks him what's going on. There's a set of social expectations in each case -- and those aren't even written. If you write down, "these are the behaviors that are appropriate and desirable for this game," sure, some people will not play it, and that's good, because they wouldn't like it; other people will like it and will be well served by the guidance on the appropriate subset of their wide range of behaviors to display.

[David Berg]

The central issue with Vincent Baker's "Town Creation" rules is that they're not just roll-on tables to give you disconnected elements: They're an interlocking that generates dynamically unstable situations

you want a system for designing adventures that is every bit as tight, formalized, and step-by-step as traditional character generation.

That does sound way more appealing than the roll-on tables I've encountered.

Now, I know you want a game where  "they choose to just cut down trees and build log cabins [and] that experience should be convincing and vivid too" -- but why? I mean, would you want to play that game? I'd be bored.

Er, yeah, that was a stupid example.  The point I was trying to make was, again, about visible contrivance.  For example, if I tell the GM up front, "I want to battle against my powerful step-father and his evil minions" -- or, more formally, if I write down a Belief (a la Burning Wheel) on my character sheet: "My stepfather and his endeavors are evil and should be stopped" -- then when I run into a nasty NPC I'll think, "Is this the guy the GM's sent to satisfy me?" and when I do discover he's a henchman of my father, I'll think, "The GM put him there cuz I asked for him, and I know there's Plot this way!"

I'm not saying this is an insurmountable problem, just cautioning against going about satisfying player desires in a way that will feel "rigged".

So you want character creation that creates characters who are driven to get entangled in horrific situations -- either it's their job, as in Baker's Dogs, or they've had some traumatic personal experience . . . or they live in a place that keeps on gettin' frickin' attacked

My general thought thus far has been:

Coercive individual situations (I'm cursed, my town's under attack, my family's most precious possession has been stolen) are very tough to turn into multi-player games that are fun for everyone. 

Coercive group situations are great (the PCs are the town guard of the town under attack), but often best suited for individual adventures as opposed to extended campaigns (though obviously you could set up a series of coercive adventures with the same characters). 

For extended campaigns, I've been inclined to rely on an "It's their chosen profession" angle.  The characters are risk-takers and thrill-seekers who'd rather confront danger for pay than learn a normal trade or continue to work on the family farm.  The world includes plenty of "paid adventurer" opportunities, as much of the world is unknown and the Empire is curious about what lurks beyond their borders.  The biggest advantage of this approach is that the characters' desires to encounter cool creepy shit are nicely in line with the players' desires to do the same.

And you want your dynamically unstable characters to snap tightly into the dynamically unstable situation.

Visible contrivance again rears its head.  The situation creation tools would have to require a certain degree of complexity, and interface seamlessly with the way the world works when it's not being adventured in.  But yeah, I see no reason why that's impossible.

Sure, your player-characters presumably wander through various villages where there's nothing wrong, and feudal domains where the lords are just and kind. Fast-forward through that. Real-life cops and doctors go weeks at a time without seeing a dead body, but TV shows about cops and doctors -- very realistic shows included -- focus on the days when somebody does risk death.

Well, purchasing food from the general store certainly doesn't need to be played through.  However, I'm leery of telling the players ahead of time what's going to be dangerous and interesting and what isn't.  If they walk into Town 1 and find it infested with daemons, I'd like them to walk into Town 2 a little antsy, and look around carefully before coming to the conclusion that nothing appears to be amiss.  At that point, though, I think some fast-forwarding does become acceptable.

Also, places bereft of threats and monsters still may have interesting cultural aspects that the players might enjoy seeing... some amount of "this is what normal life and normal people are like" definitely needs to happen somewhere... I guess that's up to the GM to guess at what's interesting and what's not... a "traditional village" should be somewhat interesting the first time you come to one in-game, but after that, identical places need not be described in detail.

I guess all these decisions could be reflected in system as well?  Maybe there could be tools for traveling games that quickly create villages, some of which are "adventuring situations" and some of which are not?

If you write down, "these are the behaviors that are appropriate and desirable for this game," sure, some people will not play it, and that's good, because they wouldn't like it; other people will like it and will be well served by the guidance on the appropriate subset of their wide range of behaviors to display.

Yeah, I'd rather provide some guides that are ignorable than leave players shrugging and guessing.  I just worry about relying upon some system with only marginal rewards (guys who are there to roleplay may not care about being named MVP) to enforce important design goals.  But perhaps I should just proceed with the assumption that everyone is already trying to play the game the way it's supposed to be played, and I'm just providing a set of tools, reminders, guidelines, etc. to assist in that effort.

My co-designer just proposed having players tie "bandages" around parts of their bodies where their character has an unhealed wound, just as immediate visual/tactile reminder of the characters' state.  I'm also pondering paper dolls to show "where you're carrying your stuff and whether your hands are free".

Any thoughts on my "Fortune tokens" ideas and visible vs invisible die rolls?

[Sydney Freedberg]

I'm not as disposed to worry about "visible contrivance," but even so, I think the examples you raise are workable. Of course the PC's evil, powerful father is going to send goons after him!

Likewise, I think "the players are all members of the town guard or other important local figures" is totally workable as a long-term campaign: Your model there isn't Star Trek or The Incredible Hullk, where the protagonists wander around from adventure to adventure, but Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the protagonists stay put in a locale that holds some resource that all sorts of bad guys keep on trying to take over. You lose breadth of coverage across your setting, but you gain tremendous depth as the same NPCs and locales show up over and over -- allowing the players to build tremendous emotional attachment to the things you keep putting under threat.

As for hiding die rolls and so on - eh. I had a GM I very much admired who did that, in D&D; I've also found it profoundly powerful in other games to see the actual numbers line up, so you can see the cold reality of how screwed you are in a way that's hard to imagine from pure description ("It has a Toughness of 5?!" in your hypothetical example.) I'm generally in favor of putting the system in full view of the players -- but that puts a big burden on the designer to keep it simple, streamlined, and elegant. "Roll initiative, roll to hit, roll hit location, roll damage, deduct armor/toughness, determine shock etc." just does not cut it, in my opinion: You can pack almost as much detail into a lot fewer steps if you're disciplined about what's important to simulate for your purposes and what's just habits picked up from other games.

Likewise, I think giving players 100 points of Energy that you take away a few at a time is a lot of number crunching for relatively little gut-wrenching impact. The very first RPG I ever designed was utter unplayable crap, but one thing I particularly liked was that the number of dice you rolled depended on how well-rested and well-fed you were: In peak condition you got three dice, but one sleepless night or day without food took you down to two, and utter exhaustion dropped you to one. If you want your world to be scary, you can't whittle away at your players 1% at a time: They've got to realize even one screw-up is gonna HURT.

[charles ferguson]

Hi David,

In my view, rewarding your players isn't about having to do things that blatantly disregard the internal consistency of your game-world. It's about deciding why players would want to play Lendlhald as opposed to some other RPG or something else entirely, and then providing concrete mechanics that gratify that.

From my reading of your examples, you consider techniques like deep immersion and in-character-only to be pivotal to your player's enjoyment of Lendhald, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that this is what actually jazzes your players the most. As Ron pointed out, in fact the opposite could well be true. (He's had a lot of experience at this, and he's good at it. You don't need to agree with him, but my advice is that if he makes a comment like that, it's worth your while to take a rigorous second look, and possibly a third and a fourth.)

To me, the fact that your players need to be frequently reminded (admonished?) to stay in-character suggests that this also may not be an essential fun-bringing element to them (although it obviously is to you).

I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't include in Lendlhald. That's your right, and your alone.
What I'm saying is that good design (of any kind) requires that every element in it powerfully serves the whole. Every assumption must be questioned. Everything you include has to be justifed, not to me or the list moderators or anyone else, but to yourself.

"What's my aim with this design element? How well does it succeed? How does that aim further my overall design goal? What's the cost of including this element? (there's always a cost). Does this cost outweigh the benefit?"

Mark Twain said "It is the duty of every writer to search tirelessly for the most brilliant passages in everything they write, and then delete them." He's talking about the seduction of keeping things in your work solely because they please you as a writer, even though they detract from the power of your work as a whole. My own experience has shown me that the more deeply I cherish an assumption or game mechanic, the more rigorously I need to challenge it. Then, whether I keep it or discard it, my design is stronger for it.

Conspiracy Of Shadows (for example) is a game that's all about horror and atmosphere. It uses player rewards, overt metagame mechanisms, is very big on player contributions to plot and setting, and (so far as I know) has no particular emphasis on in-character-at-all-times. Despite this, there are players (& reveiwers) who think its a blast to play and accomplishes its aims admirably.

So it's certainly not the case that these things aren't suited to horror or that they must destroy suspense.

It might sound like I'm telling you not to use deep immersion or in-character-only techniques. I'm not. I'm saying that you don't need to use them, so if you do, you should do it as an informed design choice backed up by analysis and observation, not because they're an unexamined assumption about how thing have to be.

Good luck with Lendlhald,

charles

[David Berg]

Charles-

How do my "deep immersion" and "no metagaming" emphases make Lendrhald more fun to play?  Well, for some players (including my current group), they don't.  But for the players the game is designed for (including myself and my co-creator), they're a big part of the basic appeal.  Really, they're kind of the point.

The immersion emphasis is not present just to make a horror/suspense/potent atmosphere game more fun, it's present because I think it is fun to be able to thoroughly lose myself in an utterly believable imaginary world.  All I need beyond that is for the world to be populated with people, places, things and events that I find interesting.  My version of "interesting" includes creepy monsters, complicated politics, familiar-but-unfamiliar lifestyles, and magical features of the environment (plus certain dark and horrific themes); thus, I have made it so.

If you'd like to discuss why I feel immersion is a good thing in itself, feel free to PM me.

-David

[contracycle]

But for the players the game is designed for (including myself and my co-creator), they're a big part of the basic appeal.  Really, they're kind of the point.

Fully agreed.