[The Rustbelt] a mighty rule-change is a-brewin'

[Marshall Burns]

So, I was at work the other day when an idea hit me, and I think it's the big fix for the Rustbelt's main problem.  (To recap, that problem is convincing the players to invest heavily in their characters, and be wholehearted advocates for the the characters, even though said characters are going to be beat up, heartbroken, addicted, shot, stabbed, and/or disfigured).  It's so damn simple.  I've beaten the bush around it a few times, and James put it into exact words in the previous Rustbelt thread when he pointed out that the Psyche gives you a reason to Push.

So, here it is:  You cannot Push unless you invoke a Psyche trait.

Recall that players can add to Psyche at-will.
Notice that this does not devalue the Push in the slightest.
And notice that players can no longer afford to neglect Psyche, or put things on it that they don't really mean.  Playing the Rustbelt without Pushing is like playing Sorcerer without going for the bonus dice.

Looking at Psyche in this light, I think a new category should be added:  Connections.  That is, relationships with people.  It can be used to Cope, and it's "Dependence" number goes up every time it is used (like Grip and Zeal).  Breaking the Connection (it's an on-or-off thing, like Limits) in some way leads to Woe, or must be justified by Faith.  The Connection must be mutual (i.e., both characters must have it) but the Dependence need not be equal.

So, I've got half a mind to implement this stuff right away and crank out a new draft.  But maybe there's some negative implications that I'm not seeing.  Anyone see any?  Anyone got anything else they want to say about the proposed rules?  Lay it on me.

-Marshall

[Krippler]

Elegant! Now I don't need to have a White-wolf player at the table to have enough dice

Actually, stacking dice became a problem in the last game I ran. When Doctor Morgan was trying to save Konrad and the mechanic from mutually killing each other he invoked a psyche trait for 5 bonus dice. I was like "aren't you gonna grab the dice for your doctor trait as well?" and the player was like "that doesn't feel very necessary, I can only get 10 max anyway". Also this balances out the players affection for their own characters with NPCs since I feel it's ridiculous to push with NPCs at times since they often start fresh with no Sweat or anything.

Most of all, it makes sense since the draft itself mentions how rare the kind of willpower to make a push is in the real world.

[jag]

So, here it is:  You cannot Push unless you invoke a Psyche trait.

I think this will be a great thing to test.  It may or may not prove restrictive in some undesirable way, but that's exactly why it should be play tested.  I whole-heartedly agree with the fundamental premise that Psyche needs to be strengthened in some way, since it's both critical to who the Rustbelt characters are, and it often seems to be less important to the players than you'd want.

Looking at Psyche in this light, I think a new category should be added:  Connections.  That is, relationships with people.  It can be used to Cope, and it's "Dependence" number goes up every time it is used (like Grip and Zeal).  Breaking the Connection (it's an on-or-off thing, like Limits) in some way leads to Woe, or must be justified by Faith.  The Connection must be mutual (i.e., both characters must have it) but the Dependence need not be equal.

So, I've got half a mind to implement this stuff right away and crank out a new draft.  But maybe there's some negative implications that I'm not seeing.  Anyone see any?  Anyone got anything else they want to say about the proposed rules?  Lay it on me.

Ha, you asked for it.

I think connections are a great new category for Psyche -- it's totally a way to cope in the harsh world of the Rustbelt.  I think the increasing "Dependence" number makes a lot of sense too.  I think breaking the connection might also be compensated for by increasing a Vice -- how many people have gone back to drugs or self-destructive behaviour after a relationship ends, or after a major schism in the family?  In fact, i see it working the same way Vice and Faith do.  Or, perhaps, how a putative Coping mechanism of Obsession might work.  Which is why...

I still think you will both make the game smooth and give players and GMs more freedom if the rules for Vice/Faith/Connections are generalized, allowing people to call it those (or Obsession, or Need, or whatever), and have it serve the same mechanical function.  Especially if people are going to need to formalize[1] new Psyche traits on the fly, they should have clean rules that give them lots of flexibility.

I'm only repeating myself because you asked, and because it's more relevant the more Psyche categories you have.

James

[1] I used 'formalize' instead of 'create' since in my mind the player should just be crystalizing something that makes sense given his character, setting, and history.

[Krippler]

Another problem the psyche to push rule solves is the question wether NPCs push or not. Unfleshedout mooks don't have psyche and thus can't push. If the GM wants the NPC to push he gives him a psyche trait and the mook is instantly transformed into a full worth NPC.

Connection seem like a good deal and it certainly tilts the game in a another direction than the tough hard loners way. I could test that too even though I suspect my players (and me in extention) would feel it's a little too pathetic (in the words original meaning) for the setting since I have a very hard time playing out relationships (any kind) between NPCs and players. If it makes it in the rules you might as well (for aestetics) group Faith, Vice and Connection (needs a better name) in a sub group (so you have have them inside a neat frame on the character sheat). Still keep Faith and Vice separate, important flavor!

[jag]

So, I've got half a mind to implement this stuff right away and crank out a new draft.  But maybe there's some negative implications that I'm not seeing.  Anyone see any?  Anyone got anything else they want to say about the proposed rules?  Lay it on me.

(Caveat: for once, a post that has nothing to do with my nag/proposal to generalize the Coping traits)

Several times in threads about the Rustbelt you've referred to two seminal incidents when Rustbelt play was drifting from Sim to Narr.  These are the ones wherein the players covered themselves with and ate the viscera of their fallen companions, and when one player shot his friend in order to escape death from a chasing monster.  Both of these are powerful scenes, and scenes that seem to be the object of a lot of your retooling.  So my suggestion (which maybe you already do), is as a first test to any proposed Psyche mechanic, see how these scenes would play it with it, and further consider whether such scenes are facilitated by said mechanic or not.

I propose this without any idea of what the answer will be, just that i think it is a valuable lens through which to examine your change.  I mean this, regardless of what the next paragraph might suggest.

Some musings about those incidents and Psyche:  One of the thing that's so powerful about those two cases is that they speak to universal mores/morals.  You just don't kill you friend, regardless of whether you have a complicated psychology or not, and regardless of what your motivations in life are.  You didn't tell us anything about the personalities of the characters, because you didn't have to: everyone understands how hard that decision must have been.  Were the description of the scene dependent on someone's "I won't eat viscera" limit, it wouldn't be as powerful.  Thinking about the scenes, i keep thinking of DitV's fallout: i can almost see someone writing "I killed my best friend to save myself d10" or "I ate my comrades' viscera d8" on their sheet.  In these cases, it wasn't the thing about the character beforehand that was so powerful, it was what it did to them afterwards.  The addition of a Psyche trait in order to push might well be a strong move in that direction, although it's not immediately clear what trait that would be in those cases (except maybe Woe?  Can you add a Woe on a push?).

This isn't meant to be a criticism of your current Psyche mechanic, and what's more it's from someone who's never actually playtested your system.  You can only understand a game by playing it, and right now i'm an armchair theorist.  So weigh my advice accordingly.  But maybe it's another thing from me that's useful to think about and then reject?

Hoping to be the person with the most rejected-but-useful suggestions,
James

[Marshall Burns]

Another problem the psyche to push rule solves is the question wether NPCs push or not. Unfleshedout mooks don't have psyche and thus can't push. If the GM wants the NPC to push he gives him a psyche trait and the mook is instantly transformed into a full worth NPC.

Yes!  Exactly!  I'm very excited about that implication myself; I've always felt guilty about making NPCs Push, and I think this will go a long way towards getting everyone (including myself) to buy into it.

And here's something that I really like about Connections:  it encourages you to not be a loner so that you can gain strength from others, BUT it also encourages you to be a loner because the other person could hurt you (inflict Woe & Tears) by breaking the Connection, and you wouldn't get a say in it.  It makes you vulnerable in equal measure to its benefit.  How cool is that?

Hoping to be the person with the most rejected-but-useful suggestions,

Heheheh

And, yeah, James, those would totally be Woe traits, and that's precisely the kind of thing I'm going for.  And Woe can be used to Push, when you've got the opportunity to redeem yourself or seek absolution or prevent the thing from ever happening again (that's where that "Is [Woe] the gateway to true strength?" Tough Question comes from).

I think those scenes would be handled very well by these rules.  In fact, there weren't any Pushes (or, Push-analogues, since the game didn't have the Push then) in those scenes, which I find highly interesting.  The rolls were a successful Nerve check (which would now be a Grizzled check) to hold down the viscera, and a successful Deception check (which would now be a Savvy check) to trick the ghouls; and a failed Run check (would now be a Slick check, or a Spry check if you're in Wilmer's game) to get away from the monster (in which there would have been no Psyche trait to invoke, had the game had that system!), a successful attack roll, and a monster behavior roll (which have been nixed as clunky and boring) to see if the monster went for the downed man.  Then came the Woe, and, in the case of the guy who developed the cannibalism fetish, the Vice.

I think it's very good that it happened without the Push.  I think the Push is what you use when you want to defy the Rust, and it hurts. But those guys surrendered to it and the corruption it represents, in order to escape unharmed.  Which is precisely the kind of options I want people to have.  (The entire magic system is a very overt and up-front manifestation of this, by the way.  You pay fucked-up obeisance to the Rust, or you take it up the nose.)

Oh, and Wilmer, speaking of those dice:  I'm considering taking the Traits out as well, and having players flesh out their character concept nicely and write it on their sheet.  I'm thinking about a bonus dice mechanic, however, that requires that the player give details as to where the character learned to do this particular task, or similar character development through detail.  What do you guys think of that?

And James again:  yes, Dependence swapped for Grip makes total sense, that needs to go in there.

-Marshall

[Krippler]

I am no fan of dog shows and neither are you really since you took out the hardened damage for good descriptions of attacks

I'm not that interested in a characters back story and I've actually developed a phobia of over worked characters since I've had a player who always spend lots of time making a detailed backstory so he gets hurt when they die dirty unlucky dice deaths. It could be nice flavor to have the characters drop a few lines of what they've been up to in the past but I wouldn't reward it personally since it is not only a reward for people who do it but also a punishment for those who don't. It creates the problem: want to survive this fight? Dream up a story about how your uncle used to take you shooting or always threw empty beer cans at you so you are super good at keeping your head down. Such elements slow the pace of the game down and aren't interactive, no choices (and locking the others around the table out from the spotlight since it's essentially a flashback) makes it uninteresting. Choices are why people play roleplaying games instead of listening to talk radio or reading books.

[Paul Czege]

Allow me to play devil's advocate. Connections (relationships) mechanics are pretty darn common in narrativist RPGs (see My Life with Master, Trollbabe, Burning Empires, etc etc etc etc). Is it possible that real human connections is the fruitful void in The Rustbelt, and so, ought not be mechanized?

Paul

[Marshall Burns]

Wilmer,
Er, well, what I had in mind wasn't something particulary in-depth...  What got me thinking about it was a line in "Where He Was Going" by William S. Burroughs (from his Tornado Alley).  The main character is in a firefight with the cops (it turns out to be "another shoot-out dream," but that's irrelevant for this), shooting them with a Tommy gun, and there's this line, (paraphrased)

He puts three bullets across [the deputy's] chest, spaced an inch apart.  He has the Touch.  "It's an instrument," Machine-Gun Kelly told him, "Play it."

Stuff like that bolded part is what I was thinking of, just little touches. 

But, just a bit ago, I started thinking, "What if this stuff could be set up in advance?"  Like, you know in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there's that scene where Tuco goes into the gun shop, asks to see like five different guns, which he dismantles then uses specific parts from each one to assemble his dream gun?  That was fuckin' cool.  I would like to reward that kind of thing, and I think that's even better than details added in the middle of a heated battle.  I would have given Tuco like 5 dice in his first conflict with that gun.  I love pay-off sequences.  Like when Brown Jenkins cut the brake cable on Chicago's car; that was so cool.  I'd love to encourage the players to be thinking about that sort of thing.

Paul,
Hm.  Real human connections, possibly. 

When I told my friend Stephen about this, he thought it was a really weird idea to quantify the value of a relationship. 
But then I explained that the number doesn't indicate the value of the relationship, just how much the person depends on it, which seemed to satisfy him.  I'm not really shooting for real human connections here, which is perhaps why "Connections" isn't the best term.  What I'm talking about is more like people as Vice.  The thing that differentiates it from Vice is that it is shared between two people, both of whom can benefit from it and both of whom can destroy it.  At its best, it might be a real connection.  At its worst, it's emotional vampirism.  As a mechanic, it asks questions that it leaves unanswered--and as long as there are questions of a moral nature that are asked but not answered by the game itself, there's still a fruitful void in there somewhere, isn't there?

Aside from that, if Connections aren't part of Psyche, how does the guy whose daughter has been kidnapped get past the iron door?  He can't do it without Pushing, and what motivation is there in that situation aside from that?  This game needs to allow him to break down the door in that situation.

-Marshall

[Marshall Burns]

What I'm talking about is more like people as Vice.  The thing that differentiates it from Vice is that it is shared between two people, both of whom can benefit from it and both of whom can destroy it.  At its best, it might be a real connection.  At its worst, it's emotional vampirism. 

Jeez, what the fuck am I talking about?  Vice can already do that.  God, I'm a dork.

[Krippler]

Since it didn't occur to you till now and never occured to me (I was thinking of having sex be a Vice but that doesn't need to be connected to a special person or ever a person at all) you should write something about relationships as Vice. Or maybe people are too jaded and only those who Hunger for human connection gets hurt in a mechanical way. Not kissing your daughter goodnight giving you withdrawal is logical if she's got a grip on you but calling the relationship a Vice is really scary for some reason. Maybe a limit like "I'd never hurt my daughter" can be stretched to include not not punching through a steel door.

These things doesn't need to be set beforehand anyway, since the Push requires Psyche people won't realise all of their Psyche components till they are in a dire situation! How cool isn't that, not having your relationship put on paper till it's really on the line and only by admitting it you get the power to save it.

[Marshall Burns]

Here's a better idea than Connections, since half of what they would do is already covered by Vice, and the other half would be handled by this:

Limits needs to be expanded into something, with a different name, that includes oaths, promises, sworn duties, that sort of thing.  Promise you made to other people, to yourself, to God, all of that.

Mechanically, it'd still work just like Limits.  (I really like the rules about Limits, because they're easy to lose, and hard to get back).

But I have no clue what to call it.

How cool isn't that, not having your relationship put on paper till it's really on the line and only by admitting it you get the power to save it.

It is super cool, that's how cool.

[Marshall Burns]

What about Obligations instead of Limits?  If you think about it, the Limits were just obligations that the character had to himself, right?

[Krippler]

What would an obligation look like?

"Take care of your child?" seems a little vague to me especially since it's easy to just hit the character with some other Psyche if it breaks that unwritten rule.

[Marshall Burns]

I'm thinking more like, "I'll never let harm come to my child,"  "I must uphold the law," "I will never kill a man in cold blood," "I promised [blank] that I wouldn't let him die."

Maybe Thresholds is a better name.  "I've never let harm come to my child," "I've never broken the law," "I've never killed a man"?