[Blazon] Four types of relationships

[stack0v3rflow]

A game on the Forge with a relationship mechanic!  Another fool tries to re-invent the wheel?

Yep.

My game Blazon is a game where all the characters play some sort of knight.  I was racking my brain figuring out why I wanted a game about knights and I think it's because they have webs of duty and passions, oaths promised on the sword and in a lover's ear, virtue and vice, swords and shining armor, violence and sex, and blood.

To represent that I want a relationship mechanic.  Looking at the types of relationship and the classic elements, I've broken them down to four types, but I don't know if they are the most useful types.

(To give you an idea of how these will be used in the game, think of cards representing characters and organizations.  The cards have those colored stones on them representing what and how they feel about the players and other cards.  The players try to maneuver and manipulate the relationships and are in turn manipulated by them.  I don't know how it's all going to work out, but it will be fun.)

Earth and air represent the feudal system.  Earth is for that which is below, the lord's relationship to his vassal, which in many cases means land but also succor and protection.  Air is for that above, the vassal's responsibilities to his lord including military aid and fealty.

Water and fire represent more interpersonal relationships.  Water is for familial relationships, both of blood and of choice (a knight that is your sworn brother, or Merlin and Sir Ector acting as a father figure to Arthur).  Fire is more short-term and passionate, both lust and hatred, the promise to a lover and a blood feud.

That's what I've come up with so far, but I'm not sure of it.  The Feudal system is important, but I'm not sure if giving it half of the types of relationship is appropriate.  And fire type relationships might be too broad.

I know that there are some games out there with relationship mechanics similar.  Did you choose any types of relationships to spotlight?  How did you chose them?  And does the four relationships that I've chosen match your idea of knights in not so shiny armor?  For your money, what games out there right now handles modeling relationships best?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Stack-dude...

I'm not sure that survey-ish questions like that are going to get you somewhere useful, so I'm gonna suggest a slightly different tack.

You say that they have webs of duty and passions, oaths promised on the sword and in a lover's ear, virtue and vice, swords and shining armor, violence and sex, and blood. What's this mean, in terms of your four types of relationships? It sounds like they have to interrelate in some way. Are water and fire naturally in opposition? Earth and air?

Or, put another way: Your classifications of relationships are cosmetic until you describe how they interact. Your concept suggests that you think they put a lot of interesting pressures on the knights, so tell us about those pressures that get you so fired up!

[Kesher]

Howdy.

Building on what Shreyas said, I'd be interested to know if you view different types of relationships being able to build on one another across elements; i.e., does it have a more powerful mechanical effect if, say, your father is your Lord, or if your lover is your vassal?  Or if your lover is your sister...  Or, conversely, would that negatively affect things?

Aaron

[stack0v3rflow]

Or, put another way: Your classifications of relationships are cosmetic until you describe how they interact. Your concept suggests that you think they put a lot of interesting pressures on the knights, so tell us about those pressures that get you so fired up!

Good point.

Earth and air have obvious, mostly formal interactions.  It's a trade off, I've given you land in return for your oath.  Ideally it would be a straight trade point for point: I take care of you, and you take care of me.

Water and fire are a bit more problematic.  Fire type could become water, getting married and trading that passion for a more gentle type of love or if I wanted to portray the source material closer than I might feel comfortable, that woman that you just slept with turns out to be your aunt.

But looking at it more, there are two different things that I want to model, not four.  I just got to the two by looking first at four.  I want loyalty and passion.  Sir Gawain wanting to kill King Pellinore for a blood feud but not doing it in Arthur's court.

But even then they can change.  Sir Gawain's love of his father (loyalty) becoming the basis of the blood feud (passion).

Which is why I wanted different types of relationships in the first place, to map that change.  The intensity stays the same, but the "direction" is different.

But that can be done by letting the players come up with their own descriptors.  Not everything needs to be formalized.

Thank you.

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

Just curious, why are you tying relationships to elemental forces?

Peace,

-Troy

[Robert Bohl]

Stack*,

I find the classification of the different kinds of relationships both interesting and one that I can immediately integrate.  However, I am unclear on how you see these relationships being used.  Are they descriptors (e.g., Father: air, sister: water, Pig-boy, earth)?  Is it like a situation where you have a certain rating for each of the four elements, and if you're acting Earthy with someone, you get that stat to use to deal with them?

I think we need to know more about the mechanics to understand how it's going to work and to offer useful feedback.

Also, what kind of feedback are you interested in?  What are you looking for from us?  The framing questions at the end of your post are mostly about other people's games, but what do you want to know about your game, from us?

* What's your real name if you're comfortable revealing it, by the way? I tend to prefer to use someone's name than an internet handle.

[LordRahvin]

Most of the material presented in the original post was color.  It was interesting color, but it doesn't have mechanics to actually resolve anything.  Just what exactly are your elements supposed to do?  Here's some ideas you may want to consider:

1) My knight has a relationship with his lord.  Is this automatically considered an EARTH relationship, or can I choose to imply a deeper heartfelt connection by specifying a WATER element?  Is the element my (player) choice or GM/system determined?

2) If my lord is an EARTH relationship, but becomes my lover will it change to a WATER relationship?

3) Does the type of relationship interact with any available options or restrictions I have?  Are they any elemental actions.  Like, can I borrow money from an AIR relationship or does that require an EARTH relationship?

4) Are there ingrained mechanics for determining a depth to a relationship, or is type the sole determining factor?  In consideration #3, can I borrow money from any EARTH relationship or do I need an EARTH relationship with a depth of 3 or higher?  Something like that?

5) My lord (an EARTH relationship) introduces me to his daughter.  Upon first interacting with her, what type of relationship do we have?  Do I have the relationship of her father, i.e., Earth?  Do I specify?  Does the GM/system assign one?  Or does elemental type only work for strong relationships after a lot of effort and time? 

6) Does the element relationship that I have with two characters affect their relationship with eachother in any way?  For example, if I develop a FIRE relationship with my lord's daughter who is a WATER relationship, will this affect their own relationship element or does that have absolutely nothing to do with me? 

7) Do my enemies have a relationship element?  Is FIRE a enemy differ from a WATER enemy, and does that alter the way I confront them in some way? 

8) What kind of elemental spread are you (the game designer) trying to encourage for players?  Are you picturing characters specializing in building one type of element over another, or are you hoping to see characters encouraged by game mechancis to have a wide spread of different relationships?

9) Assuming there's more to assigning an element than "I choose FIRE," will the method of assigning an element to a relationship differ?  Does it require different mechanics in any way?  i.e., different types of interaction skils, etc. 

10) Why elements?  Why only four types of relationships?  Is this an ongoing theme through your game or is it just used in this one aspect?  Are there FIRE-based skills, abilities, spells, areas of knowledge, combat techniques, business ventures, etc.? 

11) How long does an element last?  Is it a general guideline for the whole relationship, or does it only last a scene or adventure?  Can it be temporarily changed by anything?

12) Is there anything I can do to change the elemental type that two other characters have with each other?  If so, add this consideration: If I change the relationship type of a man and his wife from WATER to AIR, what have I done exactly and how did I do it? 

13) Do both characters in a relationship have the same elemental relationship?  Is it possible for me to regard my lord as an EARTH relationship when he regards me as a WATER relationship?  How does this interact with #12 and #2, above? 

Hope it helps.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My concerns echo Troy's.

Bluntly, I see no reason to be using the four elements at all. If you want secrets, passions, whispers, oaths, sudden rages, and betrayals, then use them or some sub-set of them as your mechanics. Those elements are totally not engaging with anything else you're talking about.

Best, Ron

[stack0v3rflow]

Just curious, why are you tying relationships to elemental forces?

I'm planning on using playing cards for my conflict resolution system.  Four suits = four elements = ...

But As you can see my first attempt at that was flawed.  Going over my big three (thank you for your blog posts on them by the way), I can see that elements have nothing to do with what I want my game to be about.  My game is about violence and sex and faith.

Stack*,

I find the classification of the different kinds of relationships both interesting and one that I can immediately integrate.  However, I am unclear on how you see these relationships being used.  Are they descriptors (e.g., Father: air, sister: water, Pig-boy, earth)?  Is it like a situation where you have a certain rating for each of the four elements, and if you're acting Earthy with someone, you get that stat to use to deal with them?

I think we need to know more about the mechanics to understand how it's going to work and to offer useful feedback.

Too true.  I'm still working on the mechanics, but one of my design goals is to do as much with symbols as possible.  Ideally the only written words used in the game would be character names.  The character sheet would just be the knight's blazon.  A thought that is still being worked out is using tarot cards to represent relationships to other people.

Conflict resolution mechanics use a deck of ordinary playing cards.  Each player has a hand of cards.  When conflict occurs, the player and the GM play a short hand of a simplified version of crazy eights. For each play of a card or draw the player playing the card describes action in the scene.  Other players can interupt actions and add description and complications to the scene anytime by playing a card that matches the rank of the current card.

It's simplified crazy eights so you can play the cards of the same color of the suit instead of just matching suit (speeds things up).  Red means that things are going well for the character, black means that things are going poorly.  Face cards can be played at any time, if they are the other color they represent a reversal in action (ie that things are now going well if they were going poorly before).  Cards of the same suit are wild and can change the color to either color and also force the other guy to draw a face down card.  When you can't play a card you must draw a card; if you can play the card then play it but if you cannot the card goes on your face down pile.

The player can end the conflict at anytime, taking all of the GM's cards into her face down pile.  Otherwise, the conflict ends the turn when the GM plays her last card, giving the player an option to play one last card.  If the last card played is red, things end well for the player.  If the last card is black, things end poorly.  All of the face down cards of the GM mean good things to the player (I think that the player just gets them).  All of the player's face down cards are bad for the player.

I was hoping that some formalized relationship mechanics could help me describe what the good and bad things from the face card piles mean.

Also, what kind of feedback are you interested in?  What are you looking for from us?  The framing questions at the end of your post are mostly about other people's games, but what do you want to know about your game, from us?

* What's your real name if you're comfortable revealing it, by the way? I tend to prefer to use someone's name than an internet handle.

Sorry, my name is Aaron.  I guess for feedback I'm looking for a sounding board to just bounce ideas off of and maybe some experience.  Most I'd like to know when I'm completely off track.  Playtesting will help, but I don't want to try to playtest a game so unfun that I get little more feedback then "burn the game".

Hope it helps.

Actually it does.  Thanks.  But I have to think about it more before I post.  I think that I should ditch the elements.  Go with what I want my game to be about, violence and sex and faith.

Since I mentioned the Big Three earlier, I should post my answers.

1. What is your game about?

The game is mostly about violence, sex, and faith.  How we can use them to create and destroy relationships with others and ourselves.  Secondarily, it is about symbols, finding and creating meaning.

2. What do the characters do?

The characters start out as new knights, traveling the land competing in illegal tournaments, dancing, flirting and sleeping with other nobles, completing missions for the church, and getting into brawls.  The characters use violence, sex, and faith as tools within guidelines and boundaries (set up by the players for each game).  Then characters cross those boundaries and the world breaks down in some way (e.g. civil war, monster attack, marriage) and the characters must go off on a quest to heal the world and themselves.

3. What do the players do?

The players have fun.  Each player plays a knight, but also has a chance to run part of the game.  During the first "safe" part of the game, the players create relationships with non-player characters, building the world as they go.  During the "war" portion, those relationships can change and destroy.  During the "quest" portion, they try to find some way to recreate going through trials based on the previous relationships.

As you can tell, my answers to question number three are very vague, it's what I'm working on.

My concerns echo Troy's.

Bluntly, I see no reason to be using the four elements at all. If you want secrets, passions, whispers, oaths, sudden rages, and betrayals, then use them or some sub-set of them as your mechanics. Those elements are totally not engaging with anything else you're talking about.

No, you are right.  The categories were artificial and felt that way.

Thank you all for your comments.  Sorry this post is so unorganized.

[Vaxalon]

According to one of the main psychological theories, humans relate to each other in the following six ways:

"This is a person who I nurture."
"This is a person who nurtures me."
"This is a person to have sex with."
"This is a person to run away from."
"This is a person to submit to."
"This is a person to attack."

[stack0v3rflow]

According to one of the main psychological theories, humans relate to each other in the following six ways:

What is the name of the theory so I can do more reading up on this idea?

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

The characters start out as new knights, traveling the land competing in illegal tournaments, dancing, flirting and sleeping with other nobles, completing missions for the church, and getting into brawls.  The characters use violence, sex, and faith as tools within guidelines and boundaries (set up by the players for each game).

-This sounds like a whole lotta fun.  So I want to ask you something.  Your description makes it sound like Violence, Sex, and Faith are the three main arenas of conflict.  How does your game reward/punish the behaviour of the knights in each of these arenas?

Peace,

-Troy

[Robert Bohl]

I was hoping that some formalized relationship mechanics could help me describe what the good and bad things from the face card piles mean.

Aaron,

Ok, it sounds like this is what we're interested then, for the purposes of this post.  How do you forsee the relationships interpreting the cards? Give us an example hand maybe?

I should mention that I have no idea how Crazy Eights is played.

[stack0v3rflow]

Heya,

The characters start out as new knights, traveling the land competing in illegal tournaments, dancing, flirting and sleeping with other nobles, completing missions for the church, and getting into brawls.  The characters use violence, sex, and faith as tools within guidelines and boundaries (set up by the players for each game).

-This sounds like a whole lotta fun.  So I want to ask you something.  Your description makes it sound like Violence, Sex, and Faith are the three main arenas of conflict.  How does your game reward/punish the behaviour of the knights in each of these arenas?

Peace,

-Troy

I think that you'll be proud to know that your question made me stare so hard at the keyboard that my eyes crossed and stared doing "magic eyes" so that the 'K' and the 'H' keys were one and the same.  And I'm still going to have to give it more thought, but I have a partial answer.

First, violence and sex act sort of like magnetism.  Love (in an idealized form) can bring people closer together.  Violence can push people farther away.  There are other forces that push and pull us all apart, but nothing like those two.

So imagine a relationship type map as a board with player pieces on it.  You have little boxes with all of the people in a mostly closed system (families, tournament, war).  And you put sticks and rubber bands on everyone, the rubber bands pulling people together, the sticks pushing them apart.  Because this is a mostly closed system, after a while it should find some sort of stability and equilibrium.  And then the characters show up.  Those people shoved to the edges of the map or those stuck in the middle try to use the characters to remake the map in their own imagine.

So violence and sex can be used to manipulate the board, pushing and pulling the pieces around, trying to move things in a better order.  Can the player characters be pushed and pulled with sex and violence too?  And what about those cases where a knight tries to get closer to someone and fails?  Is that then a push?  How about when two knights fight a long battle and at the end of it become friends or one knight surrenders to the other and becomes his prisoner?  Violence is used in that case to bring people closer together.

And what about faith?  Faith can bind people together or pull them apart.  Faith is a big part of why I wanted to write a game about knights, but I don't know what I want to say about faith itself.

So more questions to answer.  I'll think long and hard over the weekend and come back with my answers, but thank you for the question.

[stack0v3rflow]

I was hoping that some formalized relationship mechanics could help me describe what the good and bad things from the face card piles mean.

Aaron,

Ok, it sounds like this is what we're interested then, for the purposes of this post.  How do you forsee the relationships interpreting the cards? Give us an example hand maybe?

I should mention that I have no idea how Crazy Eights is played.

I'm sorry I didn't reply to your post when I replied to Troy's.  You posted as I was typing up my post and it's taken me a while to hammer out an example.  So without further ado I present an Example:

An example (by Aaron Brown)

Player starts out with a red 6, 3, 8, and king and with a black 4, 7, 2, and queen.

GM "The tournament goes well for the Black Knight, he is able to vanquish everyone and rides up to claim the laurel"

Player A "But as the Black Knight rides up the crowd gets noisy and restless, it seems like a new knight has appeared on the field"

GM "The Black Knight lowers the visor of his helmet and wheels his horse around to face this new competitor.  His lance is lowered and the crowd hushes, ready to watch the champion defeat another challenger."

The GM draws three cards, a red 4 and a black 5 and 9.

So to begin, the player plays a red card (I think that the player must always begin the conflict by playing a red card, more about this below).  The player plays the red 3.

Player A "I lower my visor and charge the Black Knight, the sun light gleaming off of my lance."

The GM then must play a card of the same color, the same rank, or a face card.  There isn't much choice, he must play the red 4 in his hand.  And since it is red describe something good for the player.

GM "The Black Knight seems a bit unready for this new competitor, and drops his lance tip a couple of inches."

The player must now play a card of the same color (red), same rank (4), or a face card.  He decides to play the black 4, signifying a reversal in fortunes.  Even though the color being black means that things are not going well for our hero, the GM has to draw a card face down and put it in front of him.

Player A "The Black Knight pulls his lance up at the last second, shattering it on my breastplate.  The crowd roars."

The GM must now play a black card, things have gotten worse for the player character and will continue its downward trend for a while.  The GM plays his black 9.

GM "The Black Knight wheels his horse around for a second pass and spurs it on for a second pass."

The player plays his black 7.  He could play his red king and change the color back to red, but if the GM's last card is black he wants to be able to change the color then and win.

Player A "Both knight score hits, but neither lance breaks"

Although a black card was played, the player described a neutral condition.  Neither contender advanced, but since the Black Knight is ahead in points, it does work out better for the Black Knight.

GM plays his last card, a black 5.

GM "The Black knight charges again, his lance held perfectly.  The crowd roars as it shatters against the shield of Sir Example.  Three points win the match."

Player A knows that things could be over right there and then, but he has a surprise up his sleeve.

Player A "I yell in pain as the full force of both man and horse feel like they are tearing my shield arm off, but I hold my lance steady and hit the Black Knight in the middle of his chest.  The crowd cheers at the splintering of the lances and then falls silent as the Black Knight starts to topple feet over head off of his horse.  Sir Example wins!"

Player A plays the red king, changing the color of the suit.  Since the final card is red, the action is positive for the player.  Also, because of the reversal of fortune earlier, the GM has one card face down which means even better things for the player.

I have the player start by playing a red so there is a price for their insolence.  I mean, so they have to pay a card at least in order to have a conflict.  I have the first card be red so that normally things go well for our hero and then go poorly.  The player has to then get things going his way again.  Starting with black there was only need for one reversal, after you thought that the GM was done with black cards, you switched it to red and won.  By starting with red, the player has to work to switch it to black, use up the GM black cards and then switch it back to red to win.

Now then, what does that face down card mean?  In other examples where one player doesn't have a card left to play, there can be a lot more than one face down card (in Blazon, if you can't play a card you draw a card, if you can play it, you do so, if you can't it goes face down in front of you).  How does the player draw more cards?