Tying PLAYERS together with their CHARACTERS' motivations

[Daniel B]

(No, this post is not a response or rebuttal to JoyWriter's excellent post, despite the similar titles. It's a whole new thread)

The issue of character-group cohesion interests me because, as JoyWriter pointed out, it makes it easier for GMs. However, there is a very metagamey element to the subject, because ultimately it comes down to a bunch of folks sitting at a table and actually running the characters. Now, even if the characters themselves are the most complementary characters in the universe, if the players running them eventually start to hate each other, the character cohesion is moot. (We must of course assume that the players enter into the game not already hating each other.) Keeping the game alive and running smoothly then comes down to, in my opinion, mechanics designed such that the players don't end up hating each other.

This is a step beyond the old "Paladin in the same group as a Neutral Evil Drow Ninja Assassin" scenario. Here, the characters are so utterly different that it's clear from the outset there will be problems. However, what about a gamist player running a pawn Barbarian, and a simulationist running a Conan-clone? Initially it seems like they'd be blood brothers for life, but the conflicting goals of the players may eventually cause trouble. I'm aware this issue is described as conflicting Creative Agendas by the Big Model. The Big Model response to this conundrum seems to be simply to have these players play different games. (At least, that's my interpretation .. I apologize to anyone who had a hand in it, if I've gotten it wrong.) However, I think the playstyles can co-exist peacefully if handled carefully in the game mechanics.

This is an issue that must be handled throughout the course of the game, but I'd like to talk about character generation in particular since the players are stuck with their characters for a solid chunk of time, and group cohesion is handled very badly in (the limited number of) other games I've seen.

For our game, to encourage the building of cohesive characters from the outset, I've been considering a few different approaches, most of which require the players to work together to build their individual characters. The best of ones I had considered was to begin the game with a pool of charGen points, like GURPS, with two exceptions:

• 1) It is one giant pool shared collectively by all the players
• 2) The charGen points are coloured into domains, such as Red-Physical, Blue-Mental, Green-Social, and the ratio of colours is determined randomly within some boundaries

The idea was that the players would have to work together and come to an agreement on how to share the points. Note that this suggestion does NOT WORK, because it can be manipulated through min/maxing, but hopefully you can see what I was going for. I was counting on greed for points to be the driving factor, and it is, but even greedy people will take less of what they don't want to get more of what they do. Furthermore, while this system hints at encouraging the players to think of how their character fits with the group, it doesn't delve too deeply into it, and it doesn't get the players to consider how they fit within the group of other players at all.

Does anyone have thoughts on a better system?

Dan

[Luke]

I think the simplest method is to circumscribe what character types are available to play and build their coordination into the game conceit. Dogs in the Vineyard and Mouse Guard set this up very well. You're all working for the same organization with the same overall goals. These games in particular don't allow for any other choices in character creation. You can personalize your d00d, but you're still part of the team.

In a D&D style game, it'd be trivially easy to create a series of six templates: fighter, thief, wizard, cleric, ranger, and mad inventor, for example. Each template comes with goals and priorities for the player in play. Each template is rewarded for driving toward its goals in a distinct fashion. Each player picks a template. Only one of each type can be chosen.

Goals can include both selfish and altruistic aspects. That way, as a player, you can be rewarded for playing it in both directions.

Coordinating player priorities is an old saw in RPGs. I think the best solutions involve the premise of the game and not "tricks" to get the players to work together.

-L

[JoyWriter]

@ title:
Woah, perhaps you could use such a game to solve the Israel/Palestine issues.

Seriously, games can bring people together, and I totally recognise the desire; you have a load of people you love and want to find something to do with them all simultaneously, so what game can they all enjoy together?

I tend to take a different view; if players play differently, then they have to take different roles in the game. Just making the characters motivations similar won't cut it; they have to actually be able to play differently but compatibly.

Actually, your system aims towards this, trying to get players to match their characters to their play types, by ability more than motivation (in the sense that I used it).

But is this enough? I played a strange D&D game a while ago where I GM'd with the following instructions: "I don't care about loot, but if you do, feel free to take some by the rules, everyone else will be running on a simplified system."
Two players then hit on this from opposite angles, one interested in what happened when their aristocratic PC ran out of money, and the other interested in sitting on a big bag of gold. (Guess who played WOW?) The system naturally favoured the second outcome, and in the end the second player left, presumably with the gold! Although I tried to keep the system modular, the fact that they were interested in different directions in the same dimension was what I found tricky to resolve. Actually the first player resolved it himself, by shifting his interests to the power-fantasy problem solving side that D&D is better at, although that led to other issues with role-crowding for another player!

Hmm, this is almost turning into an "actual play" thread, but whatever.

I can see a lot of value in having a "face" character for the socialite, a historian character for the budding GM, and a fighter for the pawn mover, but each of those should mechanically consider the purposes the player wants them for. For example, in my system (if it is ever finished), knowledge skills grant both directorial power and bonuses to combative skill checks, within GM limits, allowing players to shift playing style depending on the situation.

Secondly, the system should take what one player likes and translate it for a different type, so that the gamist is not upset that one of the other players is talking psychology with the GM, because it will give him bonuses of some kind, and is handled within the same spotlight adjudicating system that controls his tactical actions.

That is the kind of thing I aspire to doing, but it still does not resolve when two players want definite and incompatible things, not because they are dealing in different areas, but because their areas are the same.

@ Luke

I agree with your idea about classes. The reason I hope to do it free-flowing is so that mixed goals can also be accomplished within the system, that straddle the categories I can come up with. One other advantage with classes is that they can force people interested in only one field to consider their effects on others: If you ditch the fighter class and replace it with guardian, hunter, soldier etc, all with their own cultural elements, then they will have ready-made inspiration for talky bits they are not that familiar with. The trick should be that choices people don't care about should not greatly influence their choices in the stuff they do care about, as can happen when people build characters in complex systems for story reasons, only to find it makes them useless at doing what they actually want to do because of balance robustness problems. Or if they do influence them, they should be clearly marked out, so people know how to drift the game to make it fit.

[Daniel B]

Luke, I think the problem I have with this method is that making the characters stick together doesn't solve the real issue, which I discuss below in response to JoyWriter.

@ title:
Woah, perhaps you could use such a game to solve the Israel/Palestine issues.

LOL

I tend to take a different view; if players play differently, then they have to take different roles in the game. Just making the characters motivations similar won't cut it; they have to actually be able to play differently but compatibly.

Indeed, and I'm glad you stated it this way because it makes me think of a better analogy to describe what I'm going for. If one person wants to sit in a coffee bar and chat, while another wants to play a rough-and-tumble game of soccer, they're quite simply not going to work together very well at all. They may as well do their own thing and find other people to do it with. Fortunately, I'm not trying to fight against this (nor do I believe it's even *possible* to make this work and still have the participants happy). On the other hand, if you first manage to find a bunch of friends willing to play a game of soccer, you still have more than enough complexity within the game that people can take on different roles or try different approaches and have a great time. Maybe one guy prefers being goalie while another likes to be the main forward.

The "Big Model" seems to suggest that a single roleplaying game cannot incorporate playing styles that are too different, and that a game built with the same type of player in mind is the only way. This would be equivalent to setting up a soccer game where the mechanics provide nothing but goalies and defensemen, if the players all prefer being forwards, or a game with mechanics that provide only forwards if all the players are goalies.

However, in my opinion, roleplaying games have the potential to be so amazingly flexible, that it should be possible for any configuration of players to build a game for themselves that works. The problem I'm having is that digging down to discover what role a player is adopting, and allowing the GM to recognize it and make it an active part of the game, as well as coordinating it with the roles of the other players. A player who states "Oh, I'll play the fighter" may be stating something as simple as "I want to kill things" or something as complex as "I want to play out the dramatic results of a simple farmer forced to pick up a weapon for the first time in his life in order to defend his homeland, his family, and his very way of life." A sharp GM can make this happen independently of the mechanics of the game, and they can do it even in an RPG with mechanics that violate the Big Model, or with players who are not compatible in the Big Model sense. I have anecdotes myself of great games, though I'm convinced I'm a "simulationist" while one or two of my friends are gamists and this was in D&D.

Actually, your system aims towards this, trying to get players to match their characters to their play types, by ability more than motivation (in the sense that I used it).

True enough. The intention was supposed to be that, by making the characters' abilities linked, the players would need to cooperate with each other to build their characters. By having them discuss their characters, I was hoping it would stimulate a discussion that would touch on the players' true motivations. I haven't come up with anything better, at this point :-S

Although I tried to keep the system modular, the fact that they were interested in different directions in the same dimension was what I found tricky to resolve. Actually the first player resolved it himself, by shifting his interests to the power-fantasy problem solving side that D&D is better at, although that led to other issues with role-crowding for another player!

<snip>

it still does not resolve when two players want definite and incompatible things, not because they are dealing in different areas, but because their areas are the same.

You're right in that if one player wants only to collect phat-loot and the other wanting to roleplay a recently poor aristocrat, these two goals are at such odds with each other that they couldn't work in a single game. However, I believe this is a case of attempting to go too far in the other direction. I'll make use of the "soccer" analogy again.

In a game of soccer among friends, when they hit the field for the first time, they don't just get on the field and start playing immediately. Instead, they communicate with each other on how they want to play and collectively decide how the game resolution should work. It's easy with soccer, however, because most of the players will share a common knowledge of the basic rules, and so it's just a matter of sorting the details. Coming to this agreed-upon set of rules is not so cut-and-dry for a roleplaying game.

In my opinion, a set of modular rules is not going to cut it in this regard. A modular system is another way of saying "Okay, you can play soccer any way you want, just do it on the same field." This analogy makes it obvious why it's going to run into trouble; Andrew, the soccer enthusiast, will be following the Official Soccer Handbook 2008 rules, while Bob just wants to play a casual game and make loose, fast resolution decisions. They're striving towards opposite ends on the "rules resolution" dimension. If they had talked beforehand and come up with a comfortable compromise, both players could have been happy.

That common set of core soccer rules; this is what I'm trying to build. The Player's Handbook would theoretically be a straightforward, lean system with enough rules that it could adapt to any configuration of players by someone who knows how to do it. The GameMaster's Guide would be a sort of instruction manual for helping GM's learn to recognize and root out various players' styles, and adapt the game to the particular configuration of players. The easy cases would be obvious; got a bunch of blood-thirsty players fresh from the WoW camp? Give them just enough plot to warrant raiding and pillaging. The rest of the cases wouldn't be so obvious, but should still be possible. I think my group is making great progress towards this ideal, but our current character generation doesn't do anything. The coloured-shared-pool point system is a step, but a meager one.

Gawd, sorry for blathering. Didn't know I'd have so much to say.

Daniel

[Selene Tan]

A fundamental part of soccer is that the players are split into two opposing teams, and players are expected to play for the side they're on, not sabotage their teammates or try to get goals into their own net. If a player starts doing that, you'd be perfectly justified in complaining about it. If you pitch soccer to your friends and one of them doesn't want to play soccer, you might try to talk them into the one game, pick a different game, or let them go do something else while you and your other friends play soccer.

In games like Dogs in the Vineyard, it is a fundamental part of the game that the player characters are all from the same organization, traveling together. If you pitch Dogs to your friends and one of them doesn't find that interesting, then you might try to talk them into one session, pick a different game, or let them go do something else while you and your other friends play Dogs.

Basically, when you pick a sport to play, there are certain group dynamics that go along with that choice, e.g. don't pick tennis if you really wanted to play a team game. Why can't it be the same in RPGs?

[JoyWriter]

It can be, but somehow, when playing rpgs, we have occasionally tried to reach higher, and make a form of entertainment that allows more than that. In dogs for example, the GM and the players occupy two different roles; one of them's job is to sabotage the team, but in a very constructive way.

The question may be whether GM and player are the only differentiated roles that work in an rpg, whether you can have multiple GMs or multiple subdivisions of the GM role. Just as goalies and strikers play the game very differently, perhaps also, we can have compatible but different approaches to the game.

Now that may be reasonably obvious, but we cannot expect people playing our new game to immediately work out what position they would rather be playing. I've had problems introducing people to universalis because they thought it would require them to take too much responsibility for the world's consistency, even though I suspect they would love it, and that it is flexible enough to fit to their preferences, if only they knew what they were! But instead they stick to same old, and so I have tried to build more conventional systems, rather than sets of universalis hacks.

I suspect that in the case of those two, compromise would mean nothing for either. The solution is for one or both of them to hang up a part of their concept they were interested in exploring to help the other, perhaps with the hope of taking it up at a later date. I'm imagining people seeing the same contradiction and taking turns, and to even attempt that there should be some way of flagging up these overlaps, and so potential conflicts. Players can work it out between the two of them, but it would be nice to have system tools to help them.

[Vulpinoid]

I just wrote something along these lines in my blog...but I'm too lazy to do a cut-and-paste, here's a link.


http://vulpinoid.blogspot.com/2009/04/game-mechanism-of-week-14-gathering.html

V

[JoyWriter]

Some good stuff there, although I'd prefer if it was posted in the other thread, where it is closer to the main flow of discussion.

I remember being struck by how much the character motivations in Vampire the M sounded like those of highly competitive gamist roleplayers "They want supremacy, but also company!". So in the very game structure there is the idea that you should aim to take over, but in a way that is not obnoxious.That's coherent hybridisation of some form, but I'm not sure what.

[Daniel B]

Selene, indeed if one is playing a regular game of soccer and a team member starts shooting goals into your own net, one would be justified in calling foul. The thing is, with RPGs, I see no reason to disallow this kind of behaviour, as long as all team members agree ahead of time that it could happen (or otherwise we run into conflict).

Vulp/Michael .. brilliant blog!! And, as per your words, I'll have to consider these ideas further. The idea of taking the communal resources (or spiritual points for proximity) out of charGen and making it an active part of the game is a great idea, something I'll need to ponder.

JoyWriter, hmmm, I don't know much about Universalis but from what I've read briefly on Wikipedia, it sounds like it adds a dimension of shifting GM/Player responsibility. This shifting of roles isn't what I meant, really, though it can be a subset. I'm referring to different roles you can take on as a player. Exploration of the character or of the world, imposition of your will on the world through force of (the character's) arm or through politics, etc. etc. Players don't need to explicitly know what role they want to adopt, as it becomes obvious through their actions and words. The min/maxer will brag of how his char has the highest strength, while the player who talks about his fighter, "the farmer who was forced to pick up arms etc. etc.", obviously wants to explore this character.

Maybe I'm asking too much, expecting the mechanics to guide the GM towards discovering these motivations and incorporating them into a game, but ... I don't think so. I agree with Richard Bartle's view that playing an RPG is simply an exploration of one's own identity (though granted, he was talking about online MMOGs, but I believe it applies). If this is true, there are only a finite (and small) number of different types of players, so it may not be such an impossible task.

Daniel