Revisiting an old mechanic

[David C]

I'm on the umpteenth revision of my game, and I'm trying now to put it into a complete format to share with people.  But as I go over everything, I stumbled across one of the mechanics I'm using and came across an idea.

Right now, I have an influence mechanic.  Players can interact with NPCs then roll an opposed social skill check.  For every point they beat them by, they generate an influence point that can be used to influence that NPC.  (Influence is a currency.  You could spend 5 influence with the king to get access to his private library, for example.)  The problem is, and I know this from my own style of GMing, is that I just don't ever seem to keep track of that stuff. However, as a player, you tend to obsess over those details.

I have a thought though. Do you see any issues with letting the Player's *keep* all their influence?  Kind of like reputation they can spread around, the influence they generate from the performance in the town square can be applied to the king, and the influence from the king could be used on the merchant? 

There is a third possibility, one that also lets the players do the bookkeeping.  That would be, the players keep track of their different contacts and how much influence they have with them.  My only issue with this last possibility (well besides cheating, but who wants to play with cheaters anyways?) is that could mean half a page worth of space on a character sheet, and I want to use that space for better stuff.

Thanks in advance.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I solved this issue to my own satisfaction in Solar System by having the players do the bookkeeping, but making the bookkeeping entries cost a small, on-going resource price. This means that the players can do whatever they want with their bookkeeping, but in practice they won't keep anything that they thing won't be useful and pertinent to the game in the short to mid-run; rather, they'll drop those elements and only pay for the ones that are actually useful. I actually use this same system for any and all temporary, mechanized resources in the game, not just contacts.

(I should note that I'm not worried about players having too long lists of things on their character sheets so much as game balance problems that come with the players accumulating too many resources outside the experience system. Also, I want to let the players feel that they don't have to do any more tedious bookkeeping than they want and find rewarding; those who do get some benefits, but also pay for them.)

You could implement something similar by having the players go over their notes at the beginning of each session and only letting them keep X contacts. Perhaps X would be a number that depends on the character's skills or something.

[David Berg]

If you're happy with the way the influence mechanic works, your third possibility sounds like the way to go.  If players are going to be spending resources, it only makes sense to have them track those, whether it be on the front, back, or off the character sheet on scrap paper.

[David C]

Oh, this was a different response than the one I was expecting. That's why I go ahead and ask these questions anyways!

One of the things that makes me think of a traditional rpg, or just a niche rpg is too much complexity and extraneous mechanics.  My constant worry is that I'm extending myself too far into the "complex" end of the spectrum.  But I guess that's why I need to finish my pdf so I can share it with ya'll. Ha!

[Abkajud]

Particularly if your game has a relationship map or something like it, I, as a player in your game, would be all about keeping track of influence points.
Heck, it makes me want to build a whole game around it!
But I might, instead, just swipe it for my game - I need to come up with a metagame mechanic that falls short of actually granting more dice in the dice pool (which I have, but it's rarefied); something that encourages (and rewards) people pretty explicitly for helpin' out actually falls under one of my original Dreams Of D&D's Potential (maybe you know what I mean): having mechanics that cover your effect on people socially. Something like this would fall short of causing social Wounds, and would spare us always rolling a Simple Challenge back and forth whenever somebody wants to get something done.
Go Karma resolution!

[David Berg]

One of the things that makes me think of a traditional rpg, or just a niche rpg is too much complexity and extraneous mechanics. 

Well, the solution to that would be to ditch the mechanic, right? 

How important is influencing NPCs in your game?  How much do you want to direct players' attention to it?  The answers to those should hopefully tell you whether having a mechanic for it is extraneous or not...