[Acts of Evil] - Scene Framing Shennanigans

[Eero Tuovinen]

As far as motivating characters goes we didn't encounter any problems when playing. It's pretty clear, isn't it? The characters are all members of an Onset, they're essentially manipulating the rest of the world and competing with each other in a great game, like Immortals in Highlander - the prize is godhead, of course.

So putting that to practice, when I've framed scenes, it's not been difficult to set it up so that the goals of the characters and the challenges facing them have been pretty obvious. "Your fencing teacher has promised to teach you the Riddle of Steel if you'll stay after the class tonight" is an OBVIOUS frame, considering that these characters are occultists who want to wield occult power. "The tomb of king Arthus has been found under the Glastonbury Tor, you'll probably want to be there for when it's opened" is similarly unequivocal. "You've been thrown to jail after your murder attempt on the king. The execution'll be in a month, you'll probably want to escape before then. Your cellmate is a crazy philantropist" is similarly simple. The player characters in this game are thin and predictable, that's their point - they are not protagonists, just give them some hint of occult or temporal power, or endanger them somehow, and watch them run. This was when the rules still oriented individual scenes towards certain types of NPCs, mind, but the same principles should apply.

[Paul Czege]

I'm still working on idea #2.

My inclination is to wait on your articulation of idea #2 before I reply with thoughts about idea #1. What do you think?

Paul

[Valamir]

I suppose.  But its going to tracking down the same direction of establishing what your goal for the game is and then looking at the rules to see how that's being delivered, was #1 helpful?

[JoyWriter]

Paul, your game excites me for a funny reason; the intensity of constraint (from my perspective) coupled with your enthusiasm for making it work makes this design problem zing like an oscillating p orbital.

Here's the kind of constraint I'm talking about, the forces pulling it in different directions:

The manifesto component of the game, the thing it says about the world out there, that's about paving the way to serious evil with a thousand bad intentions.

Weirdly, I can't help wondering if your target audience is the most Nietzschien of power gamers, and so calling it acts of evil is a massive turn off for them. If you called it "absolute power", or something to do with beating the world down with your own awesomeness, then your starting to go in that direction. Lionel from smallville doesn't care about being evil! He's about being strong and coming out on top in the end, and that kind of attitude leads to the flips that kind of character goes through. Evil is a by-product, so people look at what they have produced as they joined the dots and hopefully shrink back in horror, or more likely, go "dude, that's harsh!".

But if you want people to move on, you need to stop the "crush him" reflex, which is a natural reaction of the more vindictive or reputation concerned villains. So how do you take that out? Firstly make the external reputation less than irrelevant: "Let people cross me, I'll take them on. No prob!" secondly give them new arenas to leave their mark on, like graphers spreading their tags as widely as possible.

Now with all that, to make the point you want, you need to consider how to join those dots, and that is a listening function.

In other words it cannot just be prep, as before prep they have said nothing, so you can't rely on them to make a prearranged pattern. I've already suggested one way to keep them moving, avoid personal cruelty, get them in globe trotter mode, but that just stops them making a larger theme on purpose, you have to get them to make one by accident. I suspect you will have to use all the flexibility the system allows and some considerable improvisational skill just to make the next scene make sense after the first. But if you can do that, and your theory is true, it should add up in the end to a bigger picture. The tricky bit, and a big tension of your design, is how to pull back that interlocking improvising to it's most minimal or teachable form.

On my own view, I'd say it needs to build, with the current situation gaining echoes of the last, but that is still a more passive form of improvisation, a more historical approach I suppose.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ralph,

The initial Terrenes currently get determined before chargen. Each player suggests a time and place from throughout human history from which he'd like his occultist to have emerged. Once all the suggestions are on the table, players can switch if they like someone else's idea better. Players start with Resistance (a problematic character stat) equal to Clarity (an advantageous stat), but reduced by one point for each other player starting in the same Terrene. So you're slightly incentivized to make your suggested Terrene compelling, because if other players choose it then you all end up with a lower initial Resistance.

As GM I like the dynamic of players suggesting the initial Terrenes quite a bit. What happens is that a player either chokes and suggests ancient Egypt, or they suggest some time and place that I know little about. And then my Wikipedia reading and web searching is creatively pretty exciting. I'd rather not lose this from the game. Your suggestion #1 is well rationalized. And it's useful and I appreciate it because it pushes me to explicitly consider some social dyamics I wasn't examining.

That is, you've got me thinking of changing how the intitial Terrenes are established. The change would be that every player suggests a Terrene, but if you choose to start in the Terrene you suggested your starting Resistance is equal to your Clarity, and if you choose to start in a different Terrene your starting Resistance is reduced by one point for every other player who decides to start in the Terrene you suggested. This would chip away slightly at your concern about players having greater expertise in their characters' Terrenes than the GM does; it would slightly incentivize players starting in Terrenes they aren't so familiar with.

This would be a minor change. I don't think it would solve the problem. But I'm not sure even the major change you propose of players not getting to specify starting Terrenes at all would solve the problem.

For Darcy's Stalinist Russia Terrene I'd prepped the 1936 return of Alexander Kerensky to Russia from his exile in France; he'd learned from Rosicrucians in Paris that Rasputin was in fact a fallen angel (maddened and tortured by his divine senses, of the needs and suffering of the humans around him), and that he was alive and living in a cave with bears in Siberia. Kerensky had come to believe that Stalin had to be stopped, and that the only one who could stop him was Rasputin. So he had returned, intent on finding him. Also, a female Catholic Pope from the future had come back in time, infiltrated the NKVD to learn of Rasputin's whereabouts, and was headed to Siberial to slay him, to prevent something horrible that he would do in the future. Darcy ignored all this stuff and instead pursued his own themes and plans of powergaming within the Party.

Even if I were to specify the starting Terrenes I'd still need the quick character concepts from the players in advance of prepping for play. This means players would have the opportunity and time to get attached to specific themes and plans for their characters. Whether they're doing this by envisioning it during chargen (Darcy?), or after chargen and prior to play, the effect is the same. The necessary time gap for the GM to prep between chargen and play means it can happen.

One of the players in the Toronto playtest did make an interesting comment during the post-game conversation. She said she liked the game because it felt like being given a pre-gen character in a convention game and then working to discover an expression of that character during play. This is exactly what it should be like.

But I've already removed a lot of player meta-power from the game since you playtested it (players no longer request scenes by specifying NPC type; the GM just frames what he wants), and as a result a greater share of the responsibility for shaping stuff rests with the GM. So I'm disinclined to go whole hog with pre-gen characters and players not having input into starting Terrenes.

What I need is players to create truly sketchy characters, with no attachment to specific themes and plans, and to play to discover an expression of the characters during play, just as if they were playing a pre-gen character.

Paul

[Paul Czege]

Hey Joy,

"Evil is a by-product..."

"...give them new arenas to leave their mark on..."

...avoid personal cruelty, get them in globe trotter mode..."

"...but that just stops them making a larger theme on purpose, you have to get them to make one by accident."

You have an incredibly clear understanding of what I'm trying to do with the game.

Yes, evil is a by-product. In the game this is driven by the equations that resolve conflicts. And it happens almost by accident. Fail in a conflict with a Wretch and your Rage increases, making you less likely to fail in subsequent conflicts with Wretches. Fail in a conflict with a Nobody (a non-occultist) and your Resistance increases; you can lower your Resistance by retreating into interactions with your occult Underlings. Want to defeat a Rival or an occult Teacher, you'll have a better chance if you can spend Power; you get Power by winning conflicts with Nobodies and Wretches. You can do impossible things with your Flesh, Voice, Imagination, and Memory, but all your conflicts take you down a path that sheds undeserved consequences to normal, decent men and women.

And there are two "level ups" that happen along the path that open the occultist PCs to new arenas. When a specific formulation of stats is achieved, a player can choose the Temporal Path or the Cosmic Path. The Temporal Path gives the character access to all of the other starting Terrenes, and to other Terrenes of the GM's imagination from throughout human history. The Cosmic Path gives the character access to extraplanetary Terrenes, to dream realms, and to future Terrenes. And when a player has achieved a further formulation of stats, the character is opened to the other Path.

You'd think a title like "Acts of Evil" would be a turn off, but I haven't seen it. In fact, the trick at this point is figuring out how to help players let their evil be a by-product, to let the mechanics do the work, to not have aggressive plans for an evil of their own designs. When players are able to do it, the game is a blast.

Paul

[C. Edwards]

Hey Paul,

I agree with JoyWriter that the name may be a part of the equation in how players are approaching the game. A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet, but I bet that if they were called "Granny Blossoms" instead that they wouldn't be given between lovers and partners in nearly the same abundance.

Evil-as-byproduct is much more interesting to me than an evil-on-purpose setup, but the name of the game is already a suggestion, before I've even approached the system or play, that I may indeed be performing acts of evil. That's going to put me in a particular mindset that I may or may not be able to modify (or even understand that modification is required) to get the most out of game play.

-Chris

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi again,

Paul, you now have 3 questions awaiting answers from me.  Here we go!

Darcy, what I mean by how do I "deliver what you need" is how do I get you from playing the game with an author mindset to playing from a character discovery/exploration mindset? How do I get you to relax and enjoy your occult powers and the serendipity of the circumstances you find yourself in?

The abrupt and not very useful answer is "Read my mind and frame stuff that interests me."  Hopefully, digging a little deeper will be of use; given that you can toss something at me at least 80% of the time that strikes me as non-boring, you just need to solve the enjoyment of occult powers side of the equation.  Here's what it would take for me: make my occult powers matter.  Within the fiction, they don't.  They carry no mechanical impact whatsoever.

What I realized as the problem was players not having actually created sketchy charaters. They had created fleshed out characters, with some embedded themes, and then pared them back to the limited requirements of chargen.

Is this what you did?

No.  Well, provisionally no.  I didn't go jumping out miles ahead and pre-plot stuff for Yaroslav.  I wanted a guy who was in an untenable situation (aristocratic background during the great purge?  uh oh!) I also wanted someone for whom the political theatre would be within the realm of possibility.  I also planted a question in there in the form of his name.  Yaroslav Hussein?  Interesting (to me, at least.)  Honestly, I just didn't go further than that.

There was no paring back.  What I sent you was a distillation of what jumped to mind within the time between when I received your email and when I replied; if memory serves, this time lapse is on the scale of hours.

...Darcy ignored all this stuff and instead pursued his own themes and plans of powergaming within the Party. ... This means players would have the opportunity and time to get attached to specific themes and plans for their characters. Whether they're doing this by envisioning it during chargen (Darcy?), or after chargen and prior to play, the effect is the same.

So...I've already answered the question.  However, I need to clarify something.  I was not exploring pre-planned themes (and powergaming within the Party held no appeal per se -- I didn't like Molotov, and I wanted to fuck with him.  Politics seemed like the order of the day.)  It's just that the specific brand of occultism you'd concocted in that terrene didn't interest me.  Why not?  I think it may have to do with how I received it.  To me, it felt like a re-hashing of your Excalibur business, which we'd previously discussed over the phone.  In other words, as you were relaying the occultism to me, I was saying to myself "Ah.  Paul didn't have any new ideas, so he just swapped Rasputin for Excalibur, and Molotov for the archbishop."  I felt a little cheated, which led directly to a lack of buy-in on my part.

Now if I'd known about the fucking Pope from the future, I would have been all over that crazy occultism (although I probably would still have been antagonizing the non-manaster occultists).  But that was such a sweet reveal, it was totally worth saving.

I'll lob the ball back at you, as I bet this may provoke some questions on your part.

Cheers,
D

[Eero Tuovinen]

Consider:
Pre-made characters.
Trollbabe-style superficial character creation that draws attention away from internal things. Replace horns and hairdo with magical relics.

The occultists are empty things in and of themselves. They only have theme: this is the guy who's all into Buddhist imagery, this one wants to bring on the Christian Harmageddon, this one thinks that he's the last heir of an Atlantean civilization. But this is all occult dross, not content; just different masks for the same entity. This is natural, for the manaster has removed his soul and poisoned his humanity. What need is there for character creation? Heck, I'd seriously consider whether those characters need a name, even; might be just the thing to get the players out of their expected character-relationship frame if the player characters didn't have a name at start. And when they get called names in the story... who's to say which one is the real name?

[Paul Czege]

Hey Darcy,

...you just need to solve the enjoyment of occult powers side of the equation.  Here's what it would take for me: make my occult powers matter. Within the fiction, they don't.  They carry no mechanical impact whatsoever.

That's interesting. Your occult powers matter as much as Color does in any game, don't they?

You think they need to matter more, or in some different way, in order for players to enjoy them? In what way would you appreciate for them to matter?

Thanks,

Paul

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Paul,

Your notion that the occult powers matter as much as other colour in other games is kinda screwy.  Sure they matter as much as stuff that's just colour (or, non-incentivised colour.)

How about these instances of incentivized colour:

• rerolls in Trollbabe
• Stories in Black Cadillacs
• cyberwear in Cyberpunk
• things held dear in Grey Ranks
• any given trait in Dogs

The strongest instance in that list as far as I'm concerned is Trollbabe -- the other example serve uses other than colour, too.

As it stands right now, the strongest use of colour in Acts of Evil is to angle at a specific Aspect for a roll.  However, this doesn't matter that much. There are very few formulae that include Aspects, and the actual aspects are so open to interpretation that it's pretty easy to always angle towards the one you want anyway (which isn't bad per se, but it does tend to 'pigeonhole' characters as to what aspect they use).

Armoured, coloured and flavoured,
D

[Paul Czege]

You know I know how to incentivize Color. (Check out the Intimacy, Desperation, and Sincerity dice in My Life with Master, the special tokens in Thy Vernal Chieftains, and the bonus die for Fetishizing in Acts of Evil itself.) But something in my gut tells me that in this case I ought not be baiting the players to use their badass occult powers. Using the powers is the fundamental creative act of the player. They should "matter" to the player not for some tacked on effectiveness bonus, but for what they allow the character to do. I don't know why they don't.

Paul

[Paul Czege]

Eero,

This is very thought provoking:

Trollbabe-style superficial character creation that draws attention away from internal things. Replace horns and hairdo with magical relics.

I think the "wants to bring on the Christian Harmageddon" example might give too much direction to that particular character. But I'm definitely chewing on the idea of starting characters who're just colorful details.

Paul

[JoyWriter]

Have you considered calling it:

On the Backs of Innocents

A game of Occult Supremacy

?
It's so overkill as to be stupid or perfect!

I see where your going with the power thing, but I don't quite see yet how that adds up over time. If you litterally tied power to harshness of effects, say with a rule like "no holding back", then it would amp up over time, but that's not really what I mean:
Systemic effects are basically when plurals misbehave, the single units don't sit neatly side by side but instead get involved in each others business. This I think can only be done in the way that conflicts overlap, or relate to each-other.

Now I'd like it that when players step back, a broader pattern would reveal itself, but I don't want that to be by fiat, like suddenly revealing a connection that you made up on the spot. Instead I reckon it's better to encourage the GM to seed links between the different stories, for the players themselves to muck up. The form of those seeds should allow one wound to impact in another place, and back again, but always within reason given the setting.

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Paul,

Right. I wasn't doubting your understanding of incentivized colour so much as I was making sure we were both on the same page.

OK – it's a design choice not to use 'tacked on' mechanical incentives to encourage players to indulge in their occult powers. This actually makes a lot of sense – cyberpunk edgerunners do criminal badassery, trollbabes get all mucky with trolls & humans, and investigators stick their noses into cyclopean mysteries best left untouched. By rights, occult masters should be reveling in all their woogie powers.

Here's why I think I didn't do it. Winning rolls in Acts of Evil is fucking hard. Moreover, the majority of the rolls in the game are de facto competitions – it's enshrined in the language (when I hear terms like "Reduction of Teachers", the game is fucking on.) This means that winning the rolls, not just enjoying the outcomes for what they are, matters to me. Couple that with the fact that winning the rolls matters in the fiction – "Do I get Olga under my sway?" and you've got a pretty powerful setup for a significant whiff factor when rolls go south. (Addendum: please note that this desire to win rolls is divorced from the whole race to kick Ephacta's rubbery ass. I want to fucking dominate these insignificant pricks, and the dice keep getting in my way!)

So what?

Well, a roll or two in, and players stop caring as much. I noticed it in Toronto – I was more engaged early on than I was later on. I wasn't the only one who made "get ready to flub this roll too" comments during the game. If I'm less engaged in play, then I'm less likely to enjoy my occultist's shoes.

As I've been writing this over the better part of an afternoon, another idea has crept into my head.

What if, as a counterpoint to the GM's authority in scene framing, the player had a corollated authority? What if the player could unlock an entirely different set of resolution rules by indulging in his occultist's woogie powers? The obvious option would be to make the alternate resolution easier for the occultist, but I don't think that that would be ultimately satisfying. I know that there's something else going on in play that would be more rewarding, but I can't put my finger on it. Perhaps it's as simple as woogie-power-rolls are narrated into the SIS post-roll by the player, regardless of success or failure.  Maybe it's targeted at agonizing NPCs.  This stuff all falls squarely under "...or in some different way, in order for players to enjoy them..."

Is this helpful?
D