Supernatural game using action points as a mechanic

[spittingimage]

I'm working on a game concept where PCs fight ghosts and other supernatural beasties by leaving their bodies and entering the spirit realm to take the fight to them on their own turf.  I'd like to differentiate the two different states by changing the mechanics: in the physical world the characters have a set of attributes reflecting their physical, social, psychological and spiritual nature that play out much the way any common-or-garden RPG would -- the players test their skills and traits vs tasks of a set difficulty and roll dice to see if they succeed or fail.  Then in the spirit realm, characters have a pool of action points which they bid (individually or collectively) against tasks.  If the bid matches or exceeds the number for the task, it succeeds.  If it falls below that number, it fails and those points are lost.  In the spirit realm there's no chance of physical injury, but potential consequences if a character runs out of action points before he's able to return to his body.

One of my goals is for the system of play and character creation to both be simple, partly as a reaction to the work-in-progress homebrew system my group is playing at the moment, where it takes a couple minutes of hard thought on the GM's part to tell us if the result of a roll is success or failure.  What I'd like is a point-based approach to buying traits at creation, with a linear progression.  The idea I have is that all of the traits start at full and the action pool starts empty, and the players shift points from one to the other to carve out a character they like.  The concept is that it's the traumatic events you experience in your life that make you powerful in the spirit world -- so for example, each physical trauma you encounter maims you a little bit more, reducing your physical stats while you grow in the spirit.

On the other hand, I like the idea of rolling multiple dice for the bell-shaped curve of results, and escalating costs for higher trait and skill scores.  It makes sense to me that it takes a lot more effort to become an expert at something than it does to become average, and that rolling dead on your skill should be a lot more likely than either catastrophic failure or godlike success.  I think I've found a mechanic that allows the best of both worlds -- linear character creation and logorithmic character advancement.  It involves levelling up skills directly rather than awarding XP.  The character sheet would track the number of times each skill is used in the course of play and advance it each time a set number of FAILURES have occurred.  Progression would naturally slow over time as the skill advances and failures happen less often -- or alternatively the character can advance at the same rate by picking harder challenges to attempt.  It would also allow different skills to have different costs for advancing.  Eg. quantum physics advances slower than gardening.

(The idea could use some refinement.  I can't see a character advancing his piloting skill by trying and failing to fly a plane, for example.)

Does this sound practical?  Or more like high-concept nonsense?

[Vulpinoid]

Does this sound practical?  Or more like high-concept nonsense?

High concept nonsense is where some of the most fertile ground for the imagination lies...

V

[Daniel B]

Sounds like an interesting concept.

One thing I'm not sure about though: if the action points are lost even by failing a bid, wouldn't it be in a player's best interest to always bid all his actions points when there is a reasonable chance of success? (Even if losing all action points means he can't return to the physical realm, the argument still applies except that the player would bid all-but-one all the time.)

Dan Blain

[chance.thirteen]

I don't think I understand the value in play of the bidding process. What sort of feel or decision making are you trying to evoke?

Also: if you have an idea about it yet, what scale did you see the point pool being vs the amount needed to win a bid? 100 points and 3-7 needed to win? Or more like 20 wiith 3-10 needed?

(My personal bias: I hate guessing games. So i want to understand what you see in it, so I might finally get it. So, no hostility to the idea intended)

One thing I would find interesting would be using the points spent, or even overspent,  to reflect the resolution to the overall challenge at hand. EG perhaps I bid more on tasks that reflect empathy, undoing damage and saving spirits, so my end results are more towards those goals, where someone else might chose an efficient approach, or one that matched a religious set of values, or whatever range of thematic approached would be allowed.

[David C]

I'm confused, I see two different mechanics in play here.  Is the first for the spirit realm (bidding for success) and the second for the real world (rolling for success?) 

What do people do in the real world that makes them want to keep any of their traits?  What reward do I have for being mostly human, as opposed to being in a permanent coma with insane AP?  Essentially, what are the goal(s) of your game? 

What's the benefit of using two different mechanics for your game?  Why not have AP traits for both sides of the coin?  The more human AP you have, the less spirit AP you have, and vice versa.

As a GM, how do you create encounters that appropriately utilize your player's AP pools. How can you be sure they have a *chance* of reaching their goal, before running out of AP?  It seems difficult to balance. 

Some food for thought.

[spittingimage]

Thanks Vulpinoid.  The only stupid question is one unasked, eh? :-)

ShallowThoughts -- the way I envision it, time spent in the spirit world would involve multiple events that require bids.  So it would be in a player's interests to keep some points back for the next event.  The ideal course for the character would be to bid the exact right number of points at each event and no more, but the players will never have more than a hint (be it a weak one or a strong one) of the point requirement in each case.

chance.thirteen -- the feeling I want to evoke is that the character is in an ethereal world where physical interaction with the environment is in the abstract.  Eg., you can push on a door as much as you like, but to actually open it, you need to spend some of your energy.  Bidding would come into play when there's an opposing force -- inertia resisting a change the character is making to the environment, or someone or something spending their own energy to keep him from reaching a goal.

The scale I've been thinking around is 20 - 30 points for a beginning character, and when there's a fight or an exorcism or whatever, the opponent would have points equivalent to about 3/4 of the entire group of PCs, so overbidding and spending points unnecessarily or underbidding then having to repeat actions will reduce their advantage bit by bit.  I'd like it to be a case of estimation based on hints from the environment and the characters' own actions rather than guesswork.  (I feel the same way you do.)

You raise an interesting idea about overspent points slanting outcomes towards the character's preferred resolution.  That's something for me to think on.

David C -- you've got it, bidding action points for the spirit world, rolling for successes in the real world.  I see the real world side of things as being preparation for the spirit side.  Eg., players can barge in and brute-force their way to victory by spending all their points, but things will be easier and safer for them if they spend some time researching a spirit's origins before they come into contact with them.  Call of Cthulhu is one of the games I've enjoyed playing in the past.  (I considered a percentile system, but decided I preferred a system where you could have monsters which are massively overpowered compared to the PCs, who can collect bonus modifiers to match them.)

It IS a case of the character's strongest areas in one world being their weakest in the other, if my character creation method works the way I hope it will.

As for creating appropriately-challenging scenarios, that's one of the areas where my thinking is haziest.  My initial idea was to say that spirits repeat the same actions every night like like a dramatic setpiece, so if you fail the first time you can come back and try again (with a suitable handicap), but that would almost certainly take some of the tension out of it.  Perhaps a better idea would be to give the characters some kind of sense for action point energy in the spirit world, so they have an idea of the range to go for when making a bid.

[David C]

I just had a couple of ideas, some of them are are mutually exclusive I think, but I'll throw them all out.

1. Players can choose between improving their AP and improving, "spirit sense" or something.  Spirit Sense is a skill that can be used to estimate the amount of spirit energy required.  You roll against a DC, and if you haven't bid enough, you're told so.  If you fail, you get no answer.  You can only use spirit sense, like, once each encounter. 

2. Moving about in the real world could allow you to award AP (or Spirit Sense) for use against a specific spirit world goal.  So lets say you find out the spirit is the dead sister, that information would help beat her, and so you get some free AP or something. 

3. After each beat encounter, you could only deduct the AP bid over the goal.  That way, the players can go on virtually forever if they can bid well, but inevitably they'd be whittled down.  Also, it'd reduce the total AP they could bid, so they might get to the final boss and find out they needed 66 of their 100 AP, but they bid too carelessly and only have 50 left.

4. Leftover AP at the end of a spirit walk could translate into a reward.

Do players get snapped back into their body when they run out of AP, or are they kind of lost in the spirit world or something?  The game sounds fun, and as long as you keep the two parallel mechanics simple enough, I think it'll be ok.  It's always good to keep in mind, the harder a game is to learn, the harder it'll be to get players to want to play it.

[jb.teller4]

(The idea could use some refinement.  I can't see a character advancing his piloting skill by trying and failing to fly a plane, for example.)

A quick thought I had reading this is that failing to fly a plane is perfectly fine... as long as failure doesn't mean you crash and die.  I'm a big fan of failure not necessarily meaning failure as much as complications or consequences. 

Depending on other elements of your system, there are plenty of reasonable consequences of failing a Flying roll besides crashing or not being able to fly.  You damage your plane without crashing (and now have to repair it, possibly requiring getting hard-to-find parts in a hostile locale).  You don't get where you're going in time (if time is a factor).  You have to make an emergency landing (which spawns a complication, like trouble with the local authorities).  Your flight instructor has to take the controls and you suffer "trauma" as shame and self-doubt (you talk about physical trauma lowering dice but strenghtening you in the Spirit World--does it have to be physical trauma?).  The NPC you were trying to impress is not impressed and doesn't want to help you (especially if it involves getting in a plane with you again).  You get shot up (i.e. your failure gets you hit rather than their success).  There are plenty of other options, too.

-John Bogart

[Vulpinoid]

(The idea could use some refinement.  I can't see a character advancing his piloting skill by trying and failing to fly a plane, for example.)

On the contrary...I'll explain some examples, specifically related to a pilot.

1. If a pilot flies perfectly from the beginning, why do they need to improve their skill?

2. Commercial pilots practice in flight simulators so they can make mistakes without killing themselves and doing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage.

3. A pilot will never know how to safely fly through storms until they've done it a couple of times. Flying into stiff winds is harder than flying in calm air, flying into a hurricane is far more dangerous than both. A pilot increases their skill level by taking on tougher challenges. If they manage to succeed just as easily under these tougher conditions, then they won't feel the need to advance their skills. They'll probably get cocky...even if it was just luck that managed to get them through.

4. A pilot who lands too fast damages the tyres on his aircraft. This is a failed roll, his aircraft has been damaged. It's probably not a catastrophic failure that kills anyone, but the pilot learns from his mistake and knows to take landings a bit more slowly from now on.

5. Also consider a pilot who can't manage a take-off because he fails his skill attempt. He may learn from his failed launch that he needs to adjust something about his take-off procedure (speed, trim, etc.), and he learns a little bit more about how his skill works in relation to the aircraft he is flying.

In this regard, I agree 100% with what John has written above.

That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

I think you need to clarify a difference between a failure from which you can learn things and a failure which just kills you, but the basic system you've proposed seems to incorporate this at it's fundamental level.

V