[Grey Ranks] The Big Grid

[Jason Morningstar]

I haven't talked about Grey Ranks much, but I feel like I'm getting close to playtesting and will start asking for feedback on bits and pieces.  So:  In GR you play Polish Boy Scouts and Girl Guides during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.  It takes place over nine scenes in three acts, tied to historical events quite closely.  You shoot nazis and fall in love.  No GM, played over three evenings with 2-4 of your friends. 

One thing I'm excited about is the grid (.pdf) that serves as group character sheet and situation generator.

Everybody has a position on the grid, starting out at the exact center.  A character's location on the grid indicates the size of the die they contribute to the collective scene pool, as well as the table from which they draw their situation element and their state of mind.  Success and failure move a character around the grid.  The further from the center you get, the larger your die size and the more insane the situational choices, provided by lists a la In a Wicked Age.  If your character moves into a corner (love that d12) and then beyond it, he's written out of the story.  Mechanically in each scene you're trying to roll over the scene number (1-9) on each of two dice, which have varying sizes.  It starts out easy and becomes nearly impossible.  The only way to succeed late in the game is to give up things that are important to your character in exchange for bonuses.  Things like your faith in God, your family, and your neighborhood.

Each scene is composed of a collective mission in which everybody has a spotlight moment, and a series of vignettes, one per player, which are introspective, emotional, and maybe romantic - probably told in flashback. 

If you succeed in your vignette, you move up on the grid toward love .  If you fail, you move down, toward hate.

If you collectively succeed in your mission, you move left on the grid toward enthusiasm.  Fail, and you all move right, toward exhaustion. 

If you go too far your character is written out of the game through death, insanity, capture, whatever.  This can happen as early as scene five but is far more likely in act three, scenes 7-9.

In the upper left corner = LOVE + ENTHUSIASM = Recklessness, immortality, doomed heroism
In the upper right corner = LOVE + EXHAUSTION = Shell shock, battle fatigue
In the lower left corner = HATE + ENTHUSIASM = Derangement, insanity
In the lower right corner = HATE + EXHAUSTON = Suicidal depression, hopelessness

The grid looks a little complicated but I think it will work very well.  I'm interested in some feedback or initial impressions.  My concerns are these:

1.  Is it odd that there will be situations where failure is a better option, mechancially, than success?  Is that a potential fun-kill?

2.  As I currently envision it, if you on an edge (a d10 space) and succeed or fail in such a way that you would go "beyond" the edge, you instead just move to an adjacent d10 (or corner) spot, based on the other half of the move that you can make.  This is a little inelegant, but I like that it keeps you in the harshest situational territory with big dice. 

3.  Do the pairings of love/hate and enthusiasm/exhaustion make sense?  Do their combinations also make sense?  Are there outcomes that these combinations can't effectively cover?

Thanks for your feedback.

[Hans]

http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/projects/games/grey_ranks/grid_01.pdf

Thats the link without the extraneous ".

I wouldn't change a thing in this, Jason.  Without the actual tables each box is tied to, its hard to say much, but in principle this idea is fantastic, and the axes (love/hate, enthusiasm/exhaustion) are perfect for the theme.

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks for fixing my link, Hans, I appreciate it. 

For context, an early draft of the situation generator can be found here. 

[Narf the Mouse]

Those tables look restrictive to me. I'd just list a level of tension and some examples.

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks, Narf, but that's actually the point.  It's an intentional constraint I stole directly from AG&G/In a Wicked Age, and it works wonderfully there.  My hope is that it's the ideal place to inject bits of history and local color that will make the game about a specific time and place.  There's no reason you couldn't create your own situational elements if the spirit moved you, though. 

[Bill_White]

Jason --

The paired dimensions of Love/Hate and Enthusiasm/Exhaustion make a great deal of sense, with one having to do with the affect (emotional tenor) of a character's experience and the other the power or "amplitude" of that experience:  exhaustion isn't just "very little enthusiasm"; it's a palpable ennui or soul-weariness that drives the character as much as enthusiasm would.  I've recently been reading the French structuralist Algirdas Greimas, and he creates "semiotic squares" that resemble your big grid in form.  One of the important insights that I took away from Greimas is thinking about the interrelationships among the adjacent terms, e.g., Love <--> Exhaustion or Hate <--> Enthusiasm, which you do in thinking about "what do the corners mean."  Another thing that Greimas mentions is the way that, at least in some cases, one set of terms will be "complex" with respect to the other, e.g., it may be possible that Enthusiasm can be read as "Both Love and Hate" while Exhaustion can be read as "Neither Love nor Hate."  Which is interesting, in that it suggests that someone with high Enthusiasm is tapping into a whole set of passions and engagements with others, while someone with high Exhaustion is highly self-absorbed, self-considering, alienated, and so forth.  In other words, Enthusiasm reinforces the emotional or affective dimension (thereby creating opportunities to go out in a blaze of glory, as it were) while Exhaustion creates paradoxical self-contradictory and thereby self-destructive impulses in combination with emotional imperatives.

So I think it's neat stuff, here.

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks, Bill, that's a little astonishing, actually. 

How do you feel about the existing possibility of drifting back into the d4 territory - ineffectual, pretty much guaranteed to fail in later scenes, in the center of the grid?  I'm not sure about what that means, if you attribute relevancy to the movement toward the edges and corners.  Returning to where you started, equidistant from the extremes, seems incongruous in the context of the Uprising, but is a mechanical possibility right now. 

[Josh Roby]

I suspect it's a mechanical possibility that will not be pursued by the players since it's mechanically disincentivized.

[Jason Morningstar]

Yeah, but you don't always get to decide if you win or lose.  A couple of savagely unfortunate scenes, and it could just happen.

I need to sit down with a million monkeys and roll some dice, just to see how it tends to resolve.  There are a lot of variables.

[Valamir]

Love the grid.

As for being yanked back to the middle...sounds like your version of a death spiral.  You lose a couple mid game conflicts wind up back in the middle with low dice going into the harder scenes where the high difficulty and low dice drive you towards the Hate and Exhaustion corner pretty remorselessly.   This sounds completely appropriate given the source material.

As long as your ability to sacrifice gives you the chance to win, even when your base dice are low, I don't think that will be a problem.  You'll just be forced to make the decision to sacrifice in Mid Game instead of End Game...which seems like a reasonable choice and reasonable price to pay for failure.

Perhaps you can tie the sacrifice mechanics to the grid position as well so that a sacrifice is worth more either a) when you have a low die, or b) when you're closer to the Hate/Exhaustion corner depending on which makes more sense.

[Narf the Mouse]

Emotional exhaustion can certainly come with hate; it's just not a very enthusiastic hate. More along the lines of sitting in a corner and glaring rather than taking action.

[Hans]

Yeah, but you don't always get to decide if you win or lose.  A couple of savagely unfortunate scenes, and it could just happen.

I need to sit down with a million monkeys and roll some dice, just to see how it tends to resolve.  There are a lot of variables.

I'm sure you have thought of this, but what if winning moves you in a favourable direction (i.e. towards love, if that is your "goal"), while losing moves you towards the other direction, but you can never drop a die size.  If this was the case, you would end up circling around the table instead of actually migrating into the middle through those "savagely unfortunate scenes" you mention. 

[Bill_White]

Thanks, Bill, that's a little astonishing, actually.

I hope by "astonishing" you mean extraordinarily insightful and helpful rather than shockingly pedantic and obscure.  Never mind; don't tell me ;-)

How do you feel about the existing possibility of drifting back into the d4 territory - ineffectual, pretty much guaranteed to fail in later scenes, in the center of the grid?  I'm not sure about what that means, if you attribute relevancy to the movement toward the edges and corners.  Returning to where you started, equidistant from the extremes, seems incongruous in the context of the Uprising, but is a mechanical possibility right now. 

If you read the edges as mapping a highly fraught emotional territory while the middle reflects a more subdued emotional ground, then it may be worth it to adjust the rules so that setbacks result in huge swings rather than incremental adjustments.  If the girl guide that I have a deep and abiding crush on is killed, my mood is more likely to swing to the same extreme of hate toward whomever I blame for her death than it is to merely slip back to non-chalance.  So you could implement some kind of rule in which failure along the love/hate dimension didn't slide you back but instead swung you to the opposite side.  A similar kind of logic might be applicable to the enthusiasm/exhaustion dimension.

This could be tied to the three-act structure of the game, so that later scenes are more fateful, more consequential than earlier ones.

Also, I think the possibility needs to exist that a character will stand still on a particular dimension on a given turn.  It's all a balancing act:  giving in to your emotions gives you greater in-game effectiveness, but leads to either burn-out and nervous exhaustion or reckless neck-risking and heroic sacrifice.  But keeping a lid on your emotions, keeping your head down, may enable your character to survive to the end of the game--but is that what you really want, either as a player or in character?  A tough choice!

All of which goes to:  I agree with you that returning to the middle is incongruous.  But staying in the middle seems like a strategy that should be enabled mechanically in a way that reflects what the "lived experience" of trying to keep it together in the middle of the Uprising would be like.

[Jason Morningstar]

Thanks for all the feedback.  I'll revise and chew on this stuff over the weekend.  One change - I'll tip the grid 45 degrees, so that you just go up, right, down or left based on your paired success or failure.  Much easier to grasp. 

Ralph:  Thanks for the die size suggestion.  As it sits the die size is fixed and scales - the there are five things held dear.  The first  brought into play (and thus prepared for destruction) gets a weak die and the last gets a fat die.  When destroyed, these are inverted, so the last thing the group clings to is worth the most when wrecked.  But that's only one way to do it.  Must consider.

Hans:  I did consider that, but I like the idea of malleable dice - losing effectiveness makes you unpopular, and the social dynamic at the table is really important, because you will be incentivized to screw other players in every scene.  Plus it is another data point to keep track of. 

Narf:  I imagine someone sitting at one of the d10's between the suicidal drepression corner and the nervous breakdown corner could definitely be in that head-space.  The situations will hopefully offer options to support that.

Bill:  Astonished as in "I would not have thought to look there for inspiration or validation!"  But strictly awesome; I'll take a look and maybe it'll end up in the bibliography if you can provide a citation...

Rock and roll, guys.  I totally appreciate your thoughts. 

[Jason Morningstar]

One more thing, Bill - I'm considering a "MVP/weakest link" mechanism after each scene, prior to movement, as discussed in the sister thread over at Story-Games.  The MVP would get to choose where they went, and staying where they are would be an option.  The Weak link - not so sure.  Maybe a blind vote by all the players as to which direction they go?  Maybe they move two in the indicated direction?  I'd like to tie it to movement rather than some other sub-system, both for elegance and because if you are the weak link, you are probably already failing mechanically. 

In any case, the MVP would enjoy the luxury of standing still on the grid if he chose.