Rules as a Three Way Struggle

[Vulpinoid]

Hey Mike,

Vey good point and I have considered this. It's one of those things that I'm really trying to grapple with as a key concept in the game. I've been GMing in various environments for almost 20 years now.

This has ranged from miniatures games between two or three people with a bit of characterisation to make things interesting (eg. If I describe my attack in a thematic way and use a piece of terrain near my figure then I get +1 to my rolls), through to the co-ordination of hundred player live roleplaying sessions.

There are always people who'll complain, and there are always people who won't want to put in the effort to make things better. It's a strange coincidence that these two groups seem to overlap quite a bit.

It's just one of those things.

What I'm trying to develop is a game concept that allows players to step up without completely divorcing themselves from their comfort zone. Lets consider the crew to be 2 thirds and 1 third GM, while the captain is 1 third player and two thirds GM. The crew have more of a GM style role than they might have in most roleplaying games, and the captain has more chance to focus on his single character while sharing a bit of the GMing workload among the group.

So hopefully it's not too much of a progression for players who are used to sitting back and enjoying the show, and this may in turn lead them toward the role of captain if they get an idea in their head about where they'd like the story to go.

I'm hoping that there will be a degree of metagaming around the sessions, as each player describes their objectives and how they'd like to achieve them. If one player has a really strong idea of where they'd like things to go, then the other players can vote them into the captain's chair to let them put their money where their mouth is. If this player ends up being an abysmal Captain, then the crew can mutiny and another player can take the role of captain for the next story without too much break in the game's continuity.

As for the second question in your post...that's where I need to ensure the framework for the game is pretty solid. It shouldn't be possible for a single player to railroad the whole session just because they want something done differently. If things come down to a deadlock then there can always be a vote, or a "Call to the Winds", after all Pirates were one of the origins of modern democracy with their "one-man, one-vote" ideas, where everyone on the ship gets a say in what's happening (it all fits in with the theme I'm working with, and that seems to add some elegance to the concept in my mind).

From an out of character perspective, matters of this nature come down to three votes. The captain gets a whole vote, the player character crew decide among themselves where their vote will be placed. Finally the lesser crew decide among themselves where their vote will be placed (this is done by drwing a card from the Wind). Mechanically, this means that if the captain and the player characters agree on something then it really doesn't matter where the lesser crew place their vote, as they will always be outnumbered. It's only if the captain and the crew cannot agree on something that the random element opf the lesser crew comes into play.

Certain mechanical aspects of play cannot be changed. So one person can't change the system, the best they could do would be to throw in some plot twists that might hopefully favour their character and disadvantage others. I know that this leaves scope for abuse from those players who simply like to stir shit, but I haven't seen a game anywhere that resolves this issue completely.

I'm hoping that the inherent purchasing mechanisms in the system will help to curtail this problem a bit.

Option 1: One player puts in three pieces of eight to cause a battle machine from the far future to rip open a hole in spacetime, therfore appearing in the middle of a roman temple during the high age of the empire. Two other players think this is just ridiculous and outbid him by spending two pieces of eight each (for a total of 4). All of the pieces of eight are thrown to Davy Jones Locker and nothing occured.     

Option 2: The two players don't like the idea of the giant robotic battle machine in ancient rome but they don't have enough pieces of eight to stop it completely. They are only able to spend one each, so they let the battlemachine through to the game. The first player then spends his piece of eight to say that the battlemachine has used up most of it's fuel in the temporal jump. The second player says that it has stepped through because there was a battle on the other side of the portal, and the machine is damaged severely. So the machine comes through and everyone has had a chance to contribute to the story.

In these examples, the presence of the battlemachine is purely flavour, but it allows other mechanical aspects to be played off it. Do the characters face a new threat based on the presence of the battlemachine? Has the pilot of the battlemachine come back in time to offer them a warning not to perform a specific task? Does the battlemachine contain the vital part needed to repair the crew's own temporal drive? How long until the presence of the battlemachine causes ripples in spacetime that will need to be address by the Quantum Integrity Marines?

The system doesn't change but the story does, and with every twist of the story things get stranger and stranger. The players now need to decide whether they are going to get caught up in a feedback loop where things keep getting so chaotic that the Integrity Marines will have to cleanse the area, or perhaps the spiral leads to the far edges of reality where other nasty things await them...things that have been struggling to break into reality for untold aeons.

Keep in mind also that the plauers are only able to claim more pieces of eight by riffing off the other payers and working with them to produce effects that entertain the whole group. So, if you get a curmudgeon who sits in the corner and only wants to interact with the other players by causing trouble, this player will only have limited influence over the game while the rest of the groups are freely contributing by helping and hindering one another as the story progresses.

I realise that this requires a critical mass of positive and creative players to work...and that's something I don't really have control over as a game designer. As a GM,  can pick and choose who I want to play my game though, and I'd choose the people who I thought would have the most fun with this level of interaction.

Tough things to think about though...thanks for the input.

Apeiron...

Fours come down to a lot in the game, and I've been thinking quite a bit about scene framing. If we say that a scene has to have those four nouns associated with it (a person, a place, an object and an event), this certainly opens the scope for rules about interacting with the environment.

Perhaps a contributing player finds it easier to affect one of these four aspects of the scene, and much harder to introduce new concepts.

Perhaps when the captain first devises the story for the session he must automatically choose these four aspects for each act. For example, during Act 2 the captain decides:

People: Undead Monkey (bad)
Place: The Brig (bad) (i'm in the brig, or maybe a friend is)
Object: Shiny Bauble (useful for bribes, or maybe it is the goal)
Event: Marriage of Governor's Daughter (security is high, or maybe i'm getting married to her)

At the beginning of each scene, four cards could be drawn from the Wind in order [eg. 6 of Hearts, 3 of Diamonds, 2 of Spades, Queen of Spades...Red, Red, Black, Black]. In such a case the first two items will appear in this scene and the second two don't.

For the act to be resolved, something has to be dealt with relating to each of the 4 scene framing elements. To resolve an element the scene's character specific complication must be overcome, then the act aspect can be manipulated.

To continue the example: this scene contain the undead monkey and the brig. The captain says that the undead monkey is running loose and must be neutralisd before it gets into too much trouble. And that the character discovers this while when they see that the ship's brig has been opened. Someone throws down a piece of eight to say that the monkey is holding the keys to the brig, it's not really a huge complication to the plot so everyone lets it through. The character has drawn the complication "Fight" for the scene, so it is decided that the fight will be against the monkey to get the keys so that the brig can be closed again. The first complication is the fight to get the key, the second complication that the character can take care of is either neutralising the monkey (who will drop the key and run away once they first get wounded), or securing the brig. Play moves on to the next player's scene once one of these issues are addressed.

We can also introduce random elements through the Wind deck when the captain's elements don't make it into the current scene.

Finally, three questions that would need to be addressed...

What happens if the players resolve the four aspects of the Act before everyone has had their scene?
Any additional characters who have yet to act may still perform their scenes, but any complications they overcome now contribute bonuses to the final showdown.

We've tied up the "Monkey", we've secured the "Brig", we've given the "Bauble" to the old guy in the lighthouse and we've made sure that the "Marriage of the Governer's Daughter" has gone through without a hitch. Now it's time to find some extra recruits to help us take down the Dread Pirate Xavier.

What happens if we get to the last scene and one of the four aspects hasn't shown up yet?
Simple, we just make sure that the definitely show up in this particular scene. Similarly, if we know that a particular aspect has already been resolved, then we can prevent this aspect from coming up again.

Of course, even if his part of the story was resolved, there's nothing to stop the monkey from waking up in the next act and causing a new round of chaos.

What happens when a scene indicates that none of the aspects is present?
If there are any unresolved aspects, then we simply redraw cards until one of the aspects does show up in the scene.

This is the kind of mechanical aspect I'm trying to work on for the game now...scene framing and how the players are able to manipulate those scene framing conventions.

V

[apeiron]

Hmm, there could be some Drama Requirement....  The Undead Monkey has a requirement of 1, the players need to play one card before/to overcome it.  Marrying the Gov's daughter might be a 3 or 4.

i was thinking that the cards wouldn't be marked as good or bad, but that maybe the cards that the captain plays face up are all goals and/or obstacles.  All the cards in the player's hands are assets.  If i have the Undead Monkey in my hand, i can send him to get the keys from the sleeping guard.  If the Undead Monkey is an obstacle, i might try to either destroy him, or make him my friend (putting him in my hand).

An alternative to the People, Places, Objects, Events model could be: Passion (love/lust), Greed, Violence, Freedom etc.

i had a model for a collectible card RPG a few years ago... i'll try to find it and share some of the ideas here.

[Vulpinoid]

i had a model for a collectible card RPG a few years ago... i'll try to find it and share some of the ideas here.

That'd be much appreciated.

As for the "Drama Requirement" that you mentioned, I'm trying to incorporate this into the rules as well. This reduces the level of GM fiat in the game and is one of the parts where the three way struggle of rules comes in, it also helps bring the captain closer into alignment with the players as they all explore an unknown world where none of them have all the information.

Let's say that there are 10 levels of difficulty in the game, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. A difficulty level of zero may exist, but this would be considered so easy that the player automatically succeeds. The difficulty of each act has a fundamental level to it, this doesn't change throughout any of the games. Act 1 = 1, Act 2 = 2, Act 3 = 4, Act 4 = 4 while Act 5 drops back down to 1 (with some modifications depending on how many unresolved issues are left in the story).

Then we apply a difficulty factor to the game, this difficulty factor is decided by the captain when he takes on the mission. Easy Missions might be worth +0, Average Missions might be +1, Challenging Missions might be +2 and Truly difficult missions might be +3, and Legendary adventures might be +4. The difficulty factor for the game determines the base amount of gold and XP that the characters can obtain if they complete the mission (note that gold is an "in-game" resource for buying equipment, hiring crew and upgrading the ship; while pieces of eight are an "out-of-game" resource for manipulating scene framing.)

In this way all the players know generally what levels of challenge they'll be facing. If it's a "Challenging Mission" and we're in Act 3, then we can expect a difficulty of 5 from most encounters, if it's an "Easy Mission" then we can expect the climax in Act 4 to have a typical difficulty of 4.

Once the basics are out of the way, we look at the specific challenges for the scene. These may have difficulty modifiers of -2 to +2. Because I'm still working out specifics, let's say there are 10 different types of challenge distributed as -2, -1, -1, 0, 0, 0, 0, +1, +1, +2. It gives the distribution a nice bell curve effect.

Tom's turn. It's the climax of the game in Act 4, as the captain he chose a legendary adventure because he was greedy for money. The base difficulty for any encounter here is a 8. He draws one of the more dangerous complication encounters, and the difficulty for the scene is pushed up by +2 to a total of 10. Things certainly aren't going to be easy, and Tom will be lucky if he gets out alive, let alone getting out with the treasure in his hands.

He can't even rely on other players having plenty of red Wind cards in their hands, at this stage of the game he's left with the cards in his own hand, and most of them are black.

The flat figures here don't necessarily reflect static difficulties, they are just a rough guide to how tricky an encounter may be. I guess their roughly like Encounter levels in D&D 3E, a measure of how much experience can be expected if the difficulty is faced.

Getting further into the interplay of difficulty factors and how they relate to card mechanics is an entirely separate discussion...possibly worthy of it's own thread. Suffice to say, a low level difficulty might consist of a single card draw against a low target value, while a high difficultly level could consist of either a single a card draw against a high target value or a number of card draws against lower target values. The exact nature of the challenge and the types of skills used depend on the type of challenge being faced and the descriptions of the players involved in the game.

V

[walruz]

I haven't played any GM-less games, ever, but I couldn't help noticing you mentioned experience being handed out, in the OP.
So you might want to look at some systems where the experience handed out aren't as much decided by the GM, as decided by the rules.
For example, the Keys system in TSOY has each player select keys for their character, which decide what their characters gain experience for. Each key also specifies the amount of XP gained, so it basically puts the GM out of a job.

[apeiron]

This strikes me as a game you play to play, rather than to advance.  Something you play once in a while when you get tired of long campaigns.  You put on the soundtrack to the PotC movies and tell a story, next week you go back to D&D.  Maybe advancement is a non-issue. 

If i were going to have advancement in this, it would be to allow players to have a greater hand capacity.  Or if you beat/win something, you can hold onto that card and use it later. 

"I ask my father in law, the governor, look the other way when our crew will be unloading a ship full of stolen rum.  We'll give his men a share of the rum for their troubles."  When i narrate that, i place that card in front of me face down.  As "tapping" it would invoke the wrath of the spooky wizard.  In effect, you gain "powers" through your adventures, in the form of contacts, assets and experiences.  "Ah, I remember when we were trapped on that island with the cannibal pygmies.  It was there that I learned how to untie complex knots with my teeth".  In this case i'm using "Cannibal Island" as a flash back retcon, to explain why i can escape the ninja's sent by the Triads.

i could see this game being like Gloom or Munchkin.  You buy a main set, and then the occasional expansion.  Or sell entirely different genres.  Well, that was the idea i had a few years ago.

[Vulpinoid]

Advancement, experience and story development.

This little rant will try to address the posts of both Walruz and Apeiron.

The game is set in a chaotic universe where anything can happen. At one extreme you have savagely guarded parts of the timestream carefully monitored by the Quantum Integrity Marines (a quasi-religious military order who have a belief that the time-line can't be altered too far because otherwise the world will implode). At the other extreme you have deranged mutant cultists hell bent on wreaking as much quantum carnage as possible. Between these extremes you have the temporal privateers. Those privateers who tend more toward order may have "letters of mark" from the integrity marines, allowing them to pursue the most dangerous reality deviants by whatever means necessary (as long as they aren't caught)...while those privateers who veer more toward chaos will deliberately disrupt the timestream to bring changes into effect that will benefit their families, their crews and most of all temselves.

In a world of flux and shades of grey, the important thing is staying true to your beliefs and maintaining a sense of self. This is measured in the game as "Coherency", the higher your coherency the more likely you can withstand the changes to the timeline that are happening all around you. Regular folks don't have coherency and they don't even realise the timestream is changing. Oops, an event is changed in the past without considering the consequences...a temporal ripple sweeps across the port, and now the negroes are in charge and the whites are all slaves...another change even further back in the timestream and now humans are no longer the dominant species, and intelligent felines have taken their place. The changes occur and those without coherency change along with them, not even remembering that things were different except with a faint feeling of deja vu when the temporal energy surge hits.

Characters are more resilient to these changes, due to the strength of conviction in their goals, their loves, and their ideals. The stronger these aspects, the higher their coherency...the higher their coherency, they less chance their forget parts of themself when the energy sweeps across their ship. Coherency is the core measure of a character in the game, this is also a resistance to magic and damage (like hit points). Coherency can only be improved by accomplishing deeds associated with your character's goals and motives, if you ignore those goals and take the easy path when things get hard, your coherency will only erode away with time.

Like many aspects of the game, coherency is measured as a function of a card's face value, from Ace to King. The whole aim of the game from a character perspective is to become a pirate "king", and to transcend the whims of fluctuating spacetime. You'd effectively become a god, but this would take many sessions to develop.

As the captain has most control over the destiny of the ship, he also has the most control over his own destiny. His coherency will rise more quickly than that of his companions through sheer force of will and a stronger ability to avoid compromises. This is another point where players should want to take over the role of captain, and where a competitive aspect kicks in.

Senior members of crew (PCs) have slightly less control of their own destiny but can still make decisions integral to the journey.

Lesser crew members are NPCs and find that their coherency level goes up very slowly. These sailors have seen beyond their former lives stuck in the timeline, they have challenged the temporal forces and will never be able to go back. They have a minimal coherency and aren't likely to improve much unless they "step up" and become PCs.

Death isn't too much of an obstacle in the game since the timeline can always be changed so that certain events didn't occur, or a body can be taken to the far future and rebuilt with bio-engineered nanotechnology. Coherency and sense of self are the combined obstacles and strengths of the characters.

So yes, there is a built in sense of improvement in the system. There is even a built in end game strategy for those players who want to "win"...(become a pirate king and transcend the timeline completely).

XP advancement will be strictly implemented through aspects of the rules. At the moment I'm working on the system that a character can earn 0-10 XP per game. In each of the five acts, a player has the chance to earn an XP if they overcome a challenge with a difficulty higher than their skill level. I'm tossing up whether to make this into an XP reward for simply facing the challenge because a character is showing their integrity in the face of adversity (and negative things will already be occuring to them if they fail...XP plus no penalty for a win makes a positive net gain, XP plus a penalty balances off some of the negatives in the case of a loss).

They also have the chance to earn an XP if they follow one of their character goals (follow the goal...get the consensus from the other players on the table...gain an XP). If a player doesn't follow their goals, there is a chance that either their XP will be eaten into (or if they have no XP at the conclusion of the scene, their coherency has a chance of being stripped away).

At the end of each session, there will be issues that simply haven't been resolved by the players. A nemesis who just couldn't be taken down, an idol that remained secure when it was meant to be stolen, a lover who forgot all about you because the currents of the timestream wiped away her memory. Campaign play comes into effect when players are able to draw these unresolved storylines into future tales. These unresolved stories can also be used as new goals by players who have overcome the initial concepts on their character sheet...

Bill: "My goal was to discover if Atlantis was real...and now I've been there. What next?"
Sue: "You could always try to work out the origins of the minotaur we found there...that could hardly have been a natural creature."
Bill: "Yep...that's my new goal, and it fits with the curious nature that my character has displayed so far."

(I'm also working with the notion that a point of Coherency can only be bought for a character once they resolve one of their goals...but that will probably have to be measured and weighed in playtesting.)

So...to answer Walruz, I guess the experience system I'm contemplating is a little like the keys in TSOY. Each player chooses a pair of goals they wish to pursue, and other players (or the captain) may incorporate these goals into the scenes. If the goals get followed, XP is gained. If not, the character risks loses their sense of self. Half the potential XP is gained in this manner, while half the XP is gained by stepping up to tougher challenges.

And...to answer Apeiron, the game had originally been concieved as a one-shot, rules minimal, hi-jinx ridden thrill-ride. But I think evolutions in the design have started to build it into a viable campaign game. Long term advancement is definitely an issue, and so is long term degradation and loss of self.

V

P.S. Thanks to everyone who's been posting back and forward with me in this thread, it's really helping to clarify some of the concepts.

[apeiron]

i suggest cranking out a version one of this so we can see all the ideas at once (i'm losing track).  Don't worry about it being complete or "good", you can do as many versions as you like.  i'm quite interested in seeing how this develops.  Keep me posted and i'll help in any way i can.

Another recommendation is to extract the GURPS/OGL of this.  The bare bones of the game without setting info or other specifics.  What is the engine of this game that you or anyone else could use to make something else?

i couldn't find my damn collectible card role-playing game sketches. Grrr. 

This is good stuff here.  Keep it up!

[Vulpinoid]

The absolute bare bones for this game was devised for a contest here...the system on a character sheet competition.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24863.0

With the final version of that competition's submission found here...

http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vulpinoid/Split2.pdf

That was a great contest and seeded some concepts in my mind for plenty of game options, but shortly thereafter I entered another contest and expanded the mechanic somewhat. That contest added pieces to the puzzle to generate a more complete and coherent game with an interesting setting. The only thing that really didn't sit well with me from that entry was the dynamic for actually running the game. Something didn't really gel.

But my final entry for that competition can be found here...

http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vulpinoid/8Sea2.pdf

One of the final pieces to the puzzle came when thinking about my experiences in Live Roleplaying, and a notion of vested interest in the storyline. I had GM'd a live role-playing campaign with 40 odd regular players for 4 years. We had found two noticeable things over the course of the game...firstly, the "powergamers" seemed to gravitate toward the top of the foodchain and destroyed the fun other players were having. Secondly, the players who wanted to bring story into the games were getting trampled because the "powergamers" didn't want that infringing on their carefully orchestrated peace and quiet. Story implies something is happening, those who get into positions of power don't want things to happen because this might cause them to be removed from power. Similarly, and GM introduced stprylines were actively squashed by a cabal of powergamers who just wanted to bully people in game as well as out of game.

At the time, we thought it might be a useful notion that you only gained experience and in game bonuses by introducing storylines that brought entertainment to the other players. The more you were willing to take on the responsibility of providing enjoyment, the more benefits you'd get in game. Hence, if you wanted to control the destiny for a faction, you'd have to hide away in a little room orchestrating plans and building up your armies...while you were doing this you'd be the GM for the members of that faction...a similarly, the only person able to run the entire city was the overall GM. If you thought your GM sucked and you wanted them out of the way, you could all on a vote of the faction and effectively mutiny against them. Someone else would take over the faction and they would get the chance to develop new stories to entertain the group.

That's where the current ideas fall into place.

A way to get an evolving crew with a captain who provides the outlines for the stories, but who can be removed if the players don't like how their ship is being run. I'm also trying to develop through these rules a step-up mechanism for passive players to become active players, and for active players to become captains.

I'll compile a working draft of the current rules set shortly.

V 

[apeiron]

Awesome.  i look forward to seeing it!