Victoria detectives and dice bidding

[MikeF]

[Adam Dray]

This is a sort of "talking stick" or "conch shell" system, where players vie for control of the thing that lets them talk. When the talking stick is basically a metagame rule that has no direct connection to the fiction, you can end up with a game that feels rather hollow in play. You're not even vying for success or failure, just different kinds of authority. This is very similar to the card game "Once Upon a Time," where you steal some sort of "narrational" authority by playing a card and continuing the existing story based on what is on that card. At least that game constrains your narration to the card in some way.

Don't get me wrong. I, too, have toyed with game designs that are essentially very simple talking stick games. I'm just warning you about some of the pitfalls.

I'd argue that success or failure MUST be tied to the fiction in a very strong way. Furthermore, game currency should be tied to the things a player has his character do. These things can't just be random. They need to be modified in strong ways by the fiction's situation. For example, what modifies the die roll that determines if you get a Case Point? If nothing the character does in the fiction modifies this roll, then the character's actions are essentially meaningless, gamewise.

Vincent Baker has talked about this kind of thing, but in different language. I think this is his "right-pointing arrow" stuff. You can find it in his anyway blog and in some podcast interviews with Vincent.

[MikeF]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the feedback. I'd been wondering about this thread, and why it wasn't attracting any responses at all. I finally decided it was a toss-up between (a) a dud idea, and (b) my mis-spelling of 'victorian'.

Either way, I appreciate your comments. Yes this is essentially a duel over narration rights, in which character actions in some senses have very little mechanical effect - it doesn't matter if the PC shoots the lascars, runs away from them, or hurls an innocent widow into their path, the mechanical chances of winning the scene are exactly the same.

However I do think there is still a connection between the fiction and the 'winning' of a scene. One element I didn't explain in my original post - partly because I'm still not sure whether this would work well - is that players would have to tie every dice bid to a character 'aspect' which had to be narrated into play. Every time the player wants to raise his bid he has to invoke an aspect and work it into the fiction. e.g. in the example I gave, Dr Wilson uses his 'Experience on the Northwest Frontier' aspect to raise his bid when wrestling the Lascars.

I think this would tie the outcome of the dice roll more closely to the fiction: to win the roll the player would have to bid lots of dice, and through bidding he would work the character's involvement into the scene.

However since my intention was that the dice-bidding should result in lots of back-and-forth in each scene, and every player would be bidding multiple times, I think this would either mean that players were using the same aspects over and over - which could get boring - or else characters would need to have forbiddingly long lists of aspects.