evaluating relative values of abstracted goals

[chance.thirteen]

Such an endearing title, but I wanted to be specific.

I enjoyed reading through Burning Empires, but the end of conflict left me feeling rudderless. There were to be concessions, from both the victor and the loser of a conflict, though the main thrust of it went to the victor. However, there were little in the way of guidelines or examples to really flesh out what was a major or monir concession. I feel this can leave either players, the GM, or both vulnerable to poor concession choices. Their characters tactics, skills, traits and luck have been tested but in the end, there is little in the way of scope to establish just how big an effect the results might have, and how to grade lesser concessions.

So, in short, has anyone ever seen, or creasted any sort of satisfactory feeling way to rate major value vs moderate versus minor? Such that perhapos one could say that these two minor goals, plus this moderate one are at least sorta equal to this major concession? This seems like it might have use in any narrative control game where players offer resolutions, compromises, concessions, and so on.


I will now make up an example off the top of my head of what I might be looking for:

Player(s) (including GM, depending on where your power lays in the game) define the scope of the conflict. This should be relatively obvious, and agreed upon for most situations. This sets a mental baseline of scale to evaluate anything specific in an abstract, but hopefully all your issues that are up in the air will be in the same scale. (For instance, I could see destruction of a given town as a highest value in terms of the local town scale, but in a country or continental war, it's probably minor at best). If there are known and affected issues on a lower scale, you could throw them into the mix, but most likely they will come out as the leftovers, minor details.

Note all values are merely relative, though if you wanted to gra de a specific setting, it wouldn't be hard. It's a subjective system after all, but it's best to know up front that a given goal isn't as important as you think, or that its very valuable.

example one: Major issues are worth two moderate, or four minor.

example two: each state is worth it's electoral votes, which are won in chunks or per vote per states constotution, however, EST states get +20%, CMT get +10%, and states that are traditionally important get another +20%, and winning a state that is traditionally for the opposition is woth +25%. I'll leave out things like reputation, idealism, cross factional bridging, own faction relationships, foreign relationships, and media relationship for now. becaue its not just about winning, it's also about how strong you come out in the end.

example three: a major contested issue is worth 60-100, a moderate one is worth 20-40, and minor ones are worth 1-10. Some issues are linked or dependent, meaning that their final value depends on getting both at once.

In any of these systems, you could allow an evaluation phase where each side decides the value of a given contest to itself, and tries to evaluate the value the other side gives it, and they work with these semi-shadow values.

ideally, you would resiolve the conflict in one or a few rolls, and that would create a budget to purchase your victorious conflicts with, and there would be a mechanism whereby the winner and loser would both get to purchase goals of their choice, as well as the ability to negotiate compromises that go beyond said budgets (I'll give you this moderate goal and two minors if you give me these five minor goals) or even partial goals.

For any given game I would heartily suggest several benchmark lists in several arenas of action (social, political, economic, personal, whatever).

My hope is that these goals and conflicts could represent states, public opinion, reputation and so on in an election, diplomatic negotiations at the table, backroom influence trading, warfare, contractual negotiations, courtroom drama, and so on. Conflicts that have multiple dimensions, and where both sides are likely to gain and lose regardless of the final results.

Any ideas?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Such an interesting query. What you're discussing here is essentially how to convert qualitative into quantitive, it seems to me. I don't usually like to do this, as quality has a quality of its own, so to speak. One thing is major and another minor because they're qualitatively different, which basically means that they're not directly comparable... or that's how it is in many games in which I use these modalities.

One way of thinking about a "major thing" and "minor thing", and which doesn't require finding out how many minor things make a major thing, is to define "major" as "equal to minor, but with an orthogonal additional bonus". For example, a "major" soldier would be just as good as a "minor" soldier when you need somebody to guard a shed, but you need specifically a major soldier to infiltrate an enemy camp - you can use a major quality in the place of the minor quality in all situations, but you can't do the reverse, as the major has some uses the minor does not. This particular relationship repeats in many games and such, so perhaps it's useful.

[chance.thirteen]

It is a useful thing to remember, to be sure.

What I am hoping for is that someone else has played some not so number crunchy game, and has found a satisfying way of relating minor and major values. In the end, while I love simulations of reality, I am hopeing for guidelines that will help keep such exchanges or negotiations vaguely fair.

I do know I want to try to keep it linear in value, despite that many games have some sort of exponential scale when it comes to representations of value (meaing that a 5 isn't just +25% of a 4, it might be +50% or even more).

I suppose I could create a detailed "value creation" calculation, giving scope, intensity, cost of maintanance, and so on.