[Acts of Evil] - Scene Framing Shennanigans

[hix]

Going back to Darcy's first post:

Here's the problem: in any given scene, my mind's racing ahead to the next scene! I'm coming up with cool ideas for stuff I'd like to do with my character. This spontaneous idea-generation clashes very powerfully with the GM-as-sole-scene-framer paradigm.

Is there a way to synthesise the following 3 ideas?

+ 'Players have cool ideas they want to express'
+ 'GM frames all scenes'
+ 'Acts of Evil is a strongly GM-prepped game'

It occured to me that maybe there's some potential in giving players the opportunity to express their cool ideas. (This kind of picks up on what Eero was saying about "allowing the characters to make their plans, but frame scenes according to the rules anyway.")

What I'm visualising is this:

+ Play out the scene
+ At the end of the scene, there's basically a free-and-clear phase where the player gets to say "This is all the stuff I want to do next"
+ If some of those ideas intersect with the GM's prep, the GM uses that part of the prep

If the ideas don't intersect with the GM's prep, the GM frames whatever scene they want. However, the GM hopefully now has more stuff to inspire them for prepping future sessions.

That's all I got.

[Michael S. Miller]

I read this thread quickly, so other things may occur to me later. I'm rather liking the stripped down creation process, particularly nameless occultists that are just a collection of external impressions, with no meaningful past. Biographies are things for lesser mortals.

I do recall that the whiff factor on rolls has been very high in all iterations of AoE. I know this is supposed to drive players to ruin more Nobodies and Victims in search of power to make the rolls easier. But successfully getting that Power is hard, too. And risks ending your scene, to boot, IIRC.

What about changing the power-getting mechanics to a sort of "and a side of fries" paradigm? That is, the normal resolutions against Teachers, Rivals, Underlings, etc. proceed as they are, but you can also seize Power from Nobodies and Victims as an additional roll that can't possibly end their scene.

Personally, I wouldn't even make it a roll to start. Go with "the first one's free" paradigm. When you first seize Power from a Nobody, you should just do it. Maybe describe using and Aspect, but no dice involved. Then, they start to build up a dice pool to make it harder-and-harder to seize Power from them, but also more-and-more rewarding if you do seize it.

To me, that would incentivize players to say "I want to put this annoying Teacher in her place. Therefore, I'm going to nonchalantly use my occult badassery to ruin the life of little Timmy, because I need the fuel of Timmy's screams to do it. It's nothing personal, Timmy. It's just business."

Since the dice make the race for godhood so UNreliable, making the process of seizing power MORE reliable will put more emphasis there, and make it more of a tool--right where you want it.

After all, aren't these corporate evils fueled by profit--that it's easy and reliably effective to treat people badly?

[Paul Czege]

Hey Joy,

Can we talk about this:

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. ....The form of those seeds should allow one wound to impact in another place, and back again, but always within reason given the setting.

Player character occultists in the game have four stats, which the game calls Aspects) -- Flesh, Voice, Imagination, and Memory. These stats are the source of occult powers for the characters. The characters can literally do anything with them:

Flesh is the physical being. Using Flesh is pushing its limits. You use Flesh to eat more hard-boiled eggs than Paul Newman does in Cool Hand Luke. You use Flesh to win a wrestling match, endure torture, spit a ten foot stream of blood into a woman's face, turn yourself half wolf, etc.

Voice is the force and scope of communication. You use it to issue commands, to know and speak languages, to communicate with aliens, to command attention, to sound like Sarah Connor's parents, etc.

Imagination is perception and your sense of reality. You use it to see distant events play out in a scrying pool, to see the true nature of a disguised being, to penetrate the barriers of reality (by seeing the insubstantiality of the barriers) or visit other planets once you've transcended Space, and to create objects from nothingness (by seeing that the object exists just within reach through an insubstantial barrier).

Memory is your awareness of past events. You use it to know the details of events that had no witnesses, to fly a plane if you've had no training, to know someone's innermost secrets, and to move to the past or the future once you've transcended Time.

So, they are wide open to the player's creative expression. You roleplay using a specific Aspect, and the value of the Aspect determines how many dice you roll to determine if you're successful. The result is success or failure, and you roleplay whatever makes sense. So what Darcy is saying is that a character's use of occult powers is just colorful flavoring, without the necessary teeth he'd need for it to be the creative focus of play.

So how would you do "misbehavior", "overlap", wounds impacting "in another place", to make the creative discovery of the occultist's identity the focus of play?

Paul

[Piers]

Hi Paul,

Can I offer a suggestion?   I haven't played and I haven't read anything beyond the ashcan, but when I did I had sort of the same reaction as Darcy: because you have to narrate to use an occult aspect, and because the specifics of the power chosen and the narration has no effect on the role, it feels like the player's occult mastery is devalued.  It may change the story, but it doesn't (seem to) change anything about the ongoing struggle.  Compare with simulationist games, for example, where the specifics of the powers chosen and the effects narrated are highly consequential for the outcome: the difference between I chose to turn into a killer whale made me win and I won because I did an acceptable monkey dance to allow me to use my flesh score.  One is about mastery and one is ... not.

So I think problem number one is making the choice consequential in some way that empowers the players, maybe not in a specifically mechanical way, but in a way that has the same sorts of effects on the fiction as ligatures and concomittance.  How about when you use an aspect you also make a statement about and describe the effects on a particular Terrene: past Terrenes for Memory, future Terrenes for Voice, present Terrenes for Flesh, and cosmic Terrenes for Imagination.  You can only do so if there is another character in the relevant Terrene.  Hopefully, as a result, this will create a jockeying for position amongst the occultists in the onset, as they position themselves relative to each other in order to use the abilities they desire, and at the same time force narration (and maybe some small penalty) onto a chosen rival character.

I think this relates to a more general observation: if you want players to revel in the opportunities presented by their occult powers as opposed to plotting and planning, then you have to deliberately make both options available to them and assign incentives appropriately: small, measurable but incremental gains from building, large, exponential gains from stealing or appropriating the resources of others.  Right now (at least in the ashcan), at least half of the actions are incremental building actions: making a Victim, for instance creates a resource which it would be better to steal.  If you want the characters to revel in their powers, they should be encountering victims made by NPC groups, and taking advantage of them.  If you want opportunism, you need to provide opportunities which really allow them to go to town.

[Darcy Burgess]

Holy shit, Piers!

Paul -- what Piers said, but not quite!

That's it.  That's the magic bullet for me.  When I use my woogie powers, I don't get to just narrate what the woogie powers are, but what the fuck happens in the fiction because of them.

It's a tiny bit of directorial power -- and the GM will have to clamp down fucking hard on how much leash I'm allowed.  Big ol' caveat: that directorial power can't obviate any of the formulae-based rolls.

Yes.
D

[Darcy Burgess]

Paul...

That last post was a super-excited, bouncing up and down in my seat, knee-jerk reaction kind of post. This is a still-bouncing, still-excited, but with time to reflect kind of post.

What if other players got to say how my woogie powers affect the fiction?  What about times when more than one other player wants to?  I'd say that players outside of my Terrene get to do it before players in my Terrene. That might help increase player involvement & interest in each others' scenes, too.

Smells delicious.
D

[Paul Czege]

Piers,

Right now (at least in the ashcan), at least half of the actions are incremental building actions: making a Victim, for instance creates a resource which it would be better to steal.  If you want the characters to revel in their powers, they should be encountering victims made by NPC groups, and taking advantage of them. If you want opportunism, you need to provide opportunities which really allow them to go to town.

I think you just detonated my head.

You're exactly right, the equations of the game define a complex path to occult godhood and players who internalize this are doing exactly what the complex path suggests is the endeavor of occultism: they're planning their acts well ahead.

Yes I'm thinking the game needs exactly what you suggest, a connection between player use and enjoyment of their occult powers and the serendipitous production of "opportunities" inspired by your example of players encountering victims made by NPC groups.

Do you have ideas how you might structure player use and enjoyment of their occult powers precipitating opportunities like newly available Victims? Should it be done in a way that isn't quite as Directorial as Darcy's suggestion?

Paul

[Piers]

Yes I'm thinking the game needs exactly what you suggest, a connection between player use and enjoyment of their occult powers and the serendipitous production of "opportunities" inspired by your example of players encountering victims made by NPC groups.

Do you have ideas how you might structure player use and enjoyment of their occult powers precipitating opportunities like newly available Victims? Should it be done in a way that isn't quite as Directorial as Darcy's suggestion?

Paul,

Some overly specific suggestions:

1. You're going to need some sort of basic stats for occult conspiracies so that you can track the sorts of things that are available to the players.  As part of the process you'll probably want to widen variety of characters and things the players can interact with: right now you have teachers, rivals, underlings, nobodies, victims, but you might also want to define secrets and resources (caches of power?), and maybe opportunities to travel between Terrenes.  Some sort of simple notation about what they are up to and what opportunities that provides.

2. I think Terrenes are central to doing this right: different occult activity and thus different opportunities in each Terrene.  Travel between Terrenes and sharing a Terrene become a much bigger deal.  The capitalist metaphor that comes into mind is strip-mining: there is so only so much in any one place, and once everything is taken the smartest thing is to move on to virgin territory.  (Though sometimes there is new find, and you want to go back.)

3. I think f consequential tie between the chosen aspect and its effect would work well.  Some directorial power is good because it allows the player to assert occult knowledge: I know this thing which nobody else knows and it allows me to be badass.  But, I don't think you want to let them mess too much with what's going on around them.  Rather, maybe if you adapt the classification of Aspects I gave above: Memory allows the player to make a claim about a past terrene, Voice about a future one, Imagination about a cosmic one, and Flesh about the current one.  As GM you combine this change with your prep and modify the circumstances (for better or worse), generating a new opportunity for anyone who can get to that Terrene.

I'm not sure if that is going exactly where you want it to go, but hopefully it'll stir up some ideas.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Piers,

I've been thinking about it. The idea I've been toying with is that maybe some player usages of occult powers trigger conflict resolutions between NPCs that play out as quick vignettes, thereby populating the terrenes with ongoing drama and newly available types of NPCs.

Though I'm not quite sure what would trigger it, how or who would make the creative decisions, and actually whether it's exactly what the game needs.

It seems to me what would work better is if a player's creative use of Aspects somehow serendipitously triggered the dramatic discovery of opportunities. A new Victim shows up in the scene, or a new Rival; stuff has clearly changed off-screen, and the occultist player, without having been ejected from his character play into Director stance, is discovering it, and knows that the discovery is related to his creative use of occult powers.

Paul

[Piers]

Yeah, that mix of choice and unforeseen consequences is exactly what I wanted to get across:

The player should know that the choices s/he makes will have different effects on the fiction, but that exact outcomes are outside their control.  The results should make sense, while also not (usually) being something they aimed for.  And these effects should sometimes be within their Terrene and sometimes in other Terrenes.  You can implement this in a variety of ways, but I think those should be the basic principles.  I do like it when one character's actions will often have positive or negative repercussions for other characters.  (I like the idea that some groups are present in multiple Terrenes: say you kill the Templar's leader in this Terrene--now the Templars in the future Terrene are up to something different.)

Focusing on the choice between Aspects, the activity the character is engaged in and the configuration of the group with which they are interacting (partially held secret by the GM) should produce enough randomness that the results seem serendipitous.

I think the second part, here, is that you have two parallel systems systems of advancement: the basic structure for pursuit of Godhood by planning (like the current one, but perhaps a bit more difficult), and then a series of advantageous situations where much more effective sorts of advancement are available: an character begs you to be his teacher; two rivals are fighting each other; etc.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Piers,

The thing that's stuck in my head is how all of your examples map so strongly to the game's four possible NPC status changes. So I keep toying with the idea of letting players frame their characters into situations where they're enjoying their occult powers (standing on a hilltop during a storm, enjoying the lightning strikes and consequent near death visions) and that somehow these events produce NPC status changes (maybe a roll of Aspect vs. Resistance, and the GM chooses an outcome -- someone sees you on the hilltop and decides he wants to learn from you). But:

It's like gambling. It's like drawing multiple cards from the Deck of Many Things. Even better because there aren't any consequences. Players would do it much to the exclusion of the core occultism, gambling they might produce a desired NPC type rather than taking the real risk of an undesired Variant Outcome of trying to actually status change an NPC.

And it's a tacked on addition to the game; it doesn't solve the problem of helping the players play differently, like Magnificent Bastards, in the existing game, in the context of the existing equations.

Paul

[Piers]

Hi Paul,

The thing that's stuck in my head is how all of your examples map so strongly to the game's four possible NPC status changes.

Not surprising, because:

a) Your status changes are smart.

b) I read and absorbed them, and now they're the framework within which I think about the game.  (ie I'm stuck too.)

So I keep toying with the idea of letting players frame their characters into situations where they're enjoying their occult powers (standing on a hilltop during a storm, enjoying the lightning strikes and consequent near death visions) and that somehow these events produce NPC status changes (maybe a roll of Aspect vs. Resistance, and the GM chooses an outcome -- someone sees you on the hilltop and decides he wants to learn from you). But:

It's like gambling. It's like drawing multiple cards from the Deck of Many Things. Even better because there aren't any consequences. Players would do it much to the exclusion of the core occultism, gambling they might produce a desired NPC type rather than taking the real risk of an undesired Variant Outcome of trying to actually status change an NPC.

And it's a tacked on addition to the game; it doesn't solve the problem of helping the players play differently, like Magnificent Bastards, in the existing game, in the context of the existing equations.

Okay, thinking metaphorically, what comes into my mind is the moment when Satan takes Christ to "a high place" and shows him the countries of the world, offers them to him if only he will bow down and worship him.  The offer aside, what seems important is that sense of god-like perspective, the idea that from this place you can see everything, everything belongs to you, and you can take advantage of it--that is what occult power is.

More concretely, I think there are a couple of things here:

a) Scene framing: the Occultist's scenes should always be framed from this sort of perspective: whatever they are involved in, they are above or outside it in some way, and this sense of mastery enables them to see something that they can take advantage of.

b) This should translate into some mechanical advantage, either a free move in a scene or a bonus to some sort of move, but that advantage is chosen for them.  Whether they take advantage of that opportunity or when in their turn they take advantage (maybe they want to make a couple of other rolls first to set things up right), that doesn't matter.  The point is that their route to occult power is not pre-planned.  They can do better if they shape their actions to take advantage of the weaknesses of others as they discover them.

c) These opportunities should arise out of the ongoing situations in each Terrene: what has already happened there and how they have interacted with the situation matter.  Characters should have incentives both to manipulate circumstances in their Terrene to their liking (coercive mastery) and incentives to leave the Terrene because they have burnt up resources and there are better opportunities elsewhere (strip-mining).

d) Travel between Terrenes and defence of particular Terrenes should be an important part of the game, and an important part of the inter-player dynamic: I'm thinking the ability to gain mastery over a Terrene (and thus a blanket bonus in it) and to expel another character from a Terrene would be good additions (though your might be able to subsume these in the current equations.)

As always, I'm just throwing out ideas.

Piers

[JoyWriter]

As I see it this idea of affecting the other terrenes while solving problems has quite a bit of what I meant; you deal with one situation and just manage to come out on top, but the effects re-appear somewhere else. Now I'm still a little woolly on the scene order; the GM sets out a train of scenes, and the players follow them. Presumably this train is justified as being their path to godlike power.

Now can this train jump from terrene to terrene? If not then players will always be producing effects in areas their character will not go to (apart from with flesh). It also limits how much they actually interact. Now here's what I see as good: The "evil corporation" likely never sees itself as evil, but looking at it from another angle we can see that it is, because of the build-up of effects that are invisible to it. If we see the effects of characters through other characters eyes, perhaps each occultist gets a better view of the others than they do of themself.

My idea is that basically you set up events for other players, which are related in fiction to your actions, show your character in a bad light.

Here's the problem; I'd like to make it about guilt and opportunity, guilt for the originator and opportunity for the receiver. The problem is that I can't see any way to make the memory skill invoke guilt. Say you follow Pier's formula for effects and say that voice effects the future, you could say that somehow it has messed up some people indirectly producing useful but damaged NPCs for any player in that terrene.

But how do you make memory say something about the character? The effect of characters surely must be limited to after them! How they use a memory might lead to side effects, but I'm not sure about causing side effects in the past. It would be like saying that historians caused the 100 years war or something. But I wonder if there is some way to wangle the "occult" business to make it seem somehow their fault.

So here's my idea in different form; characters directly compete to get better first (and possibly compete directly if they can move to the same terrene), but they also act as mirrors for each other, showing up (to the players) dodgy parts of their effects they can't see, and benefit each other because of the way that people can take advantage of evil effects in this game.

Tying the effect to the person who created it is tricky, but I think this method is better than just putting the effect in the next but one scene that character is in, because from a character perspective they probably wouldn't notice the link. In contrast, if you are an occultist and people appear showing the
effects of experiencing a shapeshifter (say they are going on a witchhunt to find more "werewolves"), then not only will you tie it to another occultist (with the player digging at the other if he works out who it was), you will smugly laugh at their lack of mastery, that they caused these effects they were not aware of, with the irony that you are doing exactly the same thing to them.

This way they are not acting in parallel, but forming this tangled web where all their actions reference each other. Hopefully this should create enough systemic effects without seeming arbitrary.

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey Paul,
Just catching up right now.

You said,

So I keep toying with the idea of letting players frame their characters into situations where they're enjoying their occult powers (standing on a hilltop during a storm, enjoying the lightning strikes and consequent near death visions)

And it triggered something for me.

Part of the reason I've been advocating some sort of Directorial power for the players so strongly is that as it stands, Occultists are purely reactive entities.  They're always "fitting in" to an existing situation, rather than taking an active role in the SIS.

What if, as part of the scene framing procedure, you (occasionally, not always) ask the player "What's your occultist up to right now?  What's on her plate?" Maybe the answer is "Trying to seduce Olivia into my entourage." or, "Breaking Vyashaslav's will." or "Building a better donut-holer."  Great -- give the player the authority over what her character is on about.  Then take that info and bend it, mutilate it and mash it in to your scene frame.

Maybe the occultist is trailing Olivia and catches her in a tryst with a Rosicrucian...
Vyashaslav's palm reader is a key step on the road to the mythic bear-cave...
The rare ecto-morpho-holeo plant is a key component of your donut holer, but the PAPSMR corporation has the last one on the planet...

I'm not articulating this very well, but the idea is to have the occultist's inner drive matter within the SIS, rather than have the occultist just buffeted about by the GM's whims.

D