Ugh, deprotagonize me! Make me like it!

[GregStolze]

Somewhere (probably on the internet) I read someone complaining about "the dice telling me what to do."  So I started thinking.  Why's that a bad thing?  Constraint breeds creativity, after all, and if you don't believe me consider the maximum security prisoner who built a crossbow out of his underpants.  I bet he never built a damn thing on the Outside.

Ahem.  Okay.  So the idea is that the system divides skills (or whatever) into two and a half loose categories.  Some skills are "proactive" -- "Hit Things With My Sword" "Talk People Into Questionable Mortgages" etc.   Some are "reactive" -- "Dodge Sword Hits" "Hide From Envious Husbands" "Resist the Hard Sales Pitch."  Some are a bit extraneous or versatile.

So.  In a conflict, you pick what kind of die to roll, from d12, d10 and d8.  But you don't choose what skill you're using or what you're attempting until you get your result, because the skill(s) you can opt to act with are constrained by what number comes up.  It's like this.

If you roll a d12, you can only use a Reactive skill if you get an odd number.  You can only use a Versatile skill if you get an even number.

Roll the d10 and, on odds, you can use a Proactive skill.  Evens, a Reactive skill.

Roll the d8 and, on odds, you can use a Proactive skill.  Evens, a Versatile skill.

So we're in a heated argument over whose turn it is to haul out the garbage.  I start with a d10 and roll an 8.  So I can only defend my position.  If I get a 7 on my d10 next round, I can try and persuade you.  If we both roll d10s and both get even numbers, we devolve into a match of "You're wrong!" "Well you're a LIAR!" and no one's persuaded.  So maybe next round I roll a d8 and get a 2.  Now I can try to do something that isn't a direct confrontation, like run away.

With the Versatile skills, I'm thinking that mostly you'd use them to help other people in the party.

The ideas behind this system (to the extent that there are any) are (1) keep things lively by forcing players to think on their feet ("Okay, do I want my choices to be AB, AC or BC?  I'll go Proactive/Versatile, and my Proactive skill will be Star Fighter Artillery while my Versatile will be Star Fighter Comms to call for help..."), (2) encourage lots of helping one another out with the "versatile" option and (3) break the oft-lamented "I hit with my sword because I'm optimized to +19 with that move and my next best option is +9" cycle.

So there would clearly need to be a strong mechanical reward for helping another PC.  What could that be?  If someone uses a Versatile skill to set you up, you can use whatever the hell skill you want next turn, no matter what die you roll and how it turns up?

Alternately, how does it change things if you roll 3d6 in different colors?  This way the system would be...

RED d6 = Odds are reactive, evens versatile, BLACK d6 = Odds are proactive, evens are reactive and WHITE d6 = Odds are proactive, evens are versatile.  You use the skill indicated by the highest single number rolled, but you add the numbers together to get that nice creamy bell curve.  (With the d12/10/8 schema, defense is privileged.)

-G.

[Adam Dray]

Interesting, Greg.

To me, deprotagonizing (deprotagonization? yow!) in game design means removing meaningful choice from the player. There's a reason that good games don't do it. You have the design chops to tread where mortal man fears to travel, though, so I read with interest.

I think what you've done is clever. You've eliminated one meaningful choice, one traditionally kept sacrosanct: which skill does a player use in any given conflict? You've replaced it with a new meaningful choice: how do I solve this problem now that I'm forced to use this weird skill?

In theory terms (IIEE), look at the time scale of resolution in the fiction, starting with the character's Intent ("I want to shoot this guard in the neck with a sharpened spoon fired from my crossbow made from underpants..."), proceeding to Initiation ("Okay, so I'm making the crossbow and a sharp spoon bolt and I am about to shoot the guard..."), then to the infamous Execution ("and the elastic twangs and the stainless steel bolt thwips into the guard's neck with a nasty slurp sound...") and finally to Effect ("then the guard slumps to the floor").

What you have done there is get the dice involved before Intent. That is, you roll to figure out what you intend to do, to some extent. None of that fictional example is possible unless the player rolls a Proactive result. If he comes up with a Reactive result, the player has to use a different Intent.

None of that changes the fact that the player has creative input (and hopefully meaningful decisions) in the other three IIEE stages. Presumably, once the dice are rolled and the flavor of Intent (proactive or reactive) is decided, nothing blocks the character's Initiation of the action, though maybe the GM has the ability to block (and blocking here would be truly deprotagonizing, no? not only do you not get to choose what flavor of action you take, but the GM blocks your limited choice? best to minimize the GM's ability to deprotagonize further).

Once the action is in motion, it must be executed -- does the die roll also determine success and failure? Say you rolled a d10, got a 9 and thus Proactive, and chose to shoot the guard with your underpants crossbow. Does that 9 carry forward to the Execution stage, or is another roll involved? In any case, something here decides if the character's action succeeds. What a suck if you wanted a proactive action, rolled a 10, and got a 2. Not only are you reactive when you didn't want to be, you also have little chance of succeeding, and you know it. What motivates you to try to do something cool with that reactive 2? You might need a second roll after Initiation.

The same problem exists for Effect. If that crappy roll carries forward all the way through to Effect, you know before you even start the scene that you lost. It's tricky to make that fun to play. There's your design challenge right there.

[Marshall Burns]

So, you're talking about rolling for opportunity, yeah? The first RPG I ever played worked like that, and it worked pretty well. "Q": the Great Gathering by my friend Rowdy Small, back in middle school.  Rowdy's game was about a world secreted in the modern world in which people wielded special and magical powers.  I lost all the information about this game long ago, but I remember that the characters' abilities were split into several categories (I remember "Abilities," "Elements," and "Lore," but there were others too), and that, when you wanted to do something, you rolled two dice, each of which was compared to a different table (between these two tables were split the ability categories, and also some general actions).  The results of this roll presented you with one or two opportunities, essentially, to achieve your goal. You never had a failed roll, unless you couldn't think of a way to use what you rolled.

[Adam Dray]

It might be opportunity. It might be method. Depends on whether or not the player can choose to do nothing once he's rolled the dice. If you are committed to the action (some action) once you roll, you're rolling for method. You've already committed part of Intent (to do something, whatever that is) without committing what you're doing.

[MacLeod]

This idea actually sounds pretty good...

The initial die could be an Intent/Initiative Roll with the next roll be the Accuracy/Effectiveness die. I'd definitely like to see a full-fledged system somehow built around this. =)

[GregStolze]

See, my thought was that the roll result would also determine your outcome.  If you get that proactive 2, you might want to do something you wouldn't with a proactive 8.  The game of it is not "Optimize my decision before I know the randomizer" -- it's not picking a recipe and going shopping, hoping the store has all the ingredients.  It's "Get my random result, and optimize THAT" -- seeing what's on the shelves and figuring out what you can cook up.

-G.

[Adam Dray]

So if you roll a 2, and you're sure it's a losing roll, whether proactive or reactive or versatile, what is there to optimize? What meaningful input can the player give at this point?

I suspect that hypothetical players in hypothetical games are gonna see they lost and just handwave the round of conflict. In fact, if the rules don't say "once you roll, you have committed your character to action (and a specific kind of action determined by the roll)," I think players will say, "I rolled a 2. I... decide not to do anything. Now, I want to do something else." Repeat until they get a good roll.

I do get that the player still has an opportunity for creative input. They get to describe how they fail, after all. There's no tension though. I just question how this is fun, which is the point of this thread, right?

[Callan S.]

I think there's some blurring of the word 'outcome' and 'result' here. It sounds like the dice are supposed to help generate a situation/certain resources/whats on the shelf. Then you work with those resources to determine the true outcome or result or whatever the heck happens next bit.

I'm more inclined to call it dynamic scene generation than deprotagonisation. Mind you, on the D&D forums I was surprised to find people calling starting play on the roof of a moving train mid fist fight, railroading, or even a bland starting play in a bar, railroading (and thus since that was okay, went their logic, so was all railroading...but dats anudda story).

[GreatWolf]

Greg,

You might want to check out MonkeyDome, which does something similar to what you're talking about. If nothing else, hopefully it will be inspirational for you.

[sockmonkey]

I love the idea of basically having to do what you can with what you got. That can make for some interesting choices and outcomes.

I haven't seen anything about there being a GM involved. Is there a GM and if so what would be his main responsibilities?

[JoyWriter]

I like the idea of an effects based system based along that route: I remember games we used to play where PCs basically had no power given what they were fighting, aside from a lucky break in the first challenge, and the whole of the resolution system was subverting the scene elements to our own ends. In other words, "you have a tube of toothpaste, a lighter and a bottle of coke, and you must sneak into this base". That doesn't immediately grab me as deprotagonising though; we were using only what came to hand, which jumped out of the GMs mind like it was randomly generated, but we were still playing characters that were implementing their own plans and acting out a narrative centred on themselves, by the choices that we made about their intentions.

On the other hand, I can see an interesting game where even their intentions are defined externally. I wonder whether such a game would suit the first Borne film "What kind of man am I" vibe. It could be sort of like a colouring-in book for adults, in that the structure is decided for you and you just have to make it aesthetically pleasing, thematically appropriate etc. It's like the opposite of a drama mechanism; it's not that player intentions are mediated by the needs of the GM's plot, the players and the GM work together to make all the characters do things that are not completely mad and irrelevant. It's a closer job to making patterns out of stars! If you were to go that far in this direction, I think that you should probably collapse the GM/player divide and just divy up these partially self-directing fictional elements between players, with everyone trying to make sense of what they are doing.

On the other hand, you could take the Borne thing and build up character identity slowly like a sort of case file, deciding what behaviour was "true" and what was "an aberration", and then risking those character traits for rerolls. Another way to do it might be to roll 3 or more dice simultaneously, with them doing the highest result at that success level. Designing a character would be a matter of assigning different sized dice to those passions/attitudes, with the rest coming later via the case file mechanic. Also failed rerolls could be false beliefs they have about themselves, which could then be built in to narration.

[GregStolze]

Well, one very odd idea I'm going to work on at some point is "Superego," a sort of Freudian superhero game in which heroes and villains (or Ids and Superegos) are projected by sleeping ordinary folk, most of whom have no idea what they're creating.  I'm thinking it'll have a determined scene set like the Roach with rotating GM duties.  Everyone works together to come up with X normal folks (where X = number of players), X/2 Ids and X/2 Superegos.  By the time the scenes have all been worked through, people should know which character is projecting which superhuman -- and why.

-G.

[TonyLB]

I don't see why this general concept necessarily needs to be deprotagonizing.  I mean ... I suppose if you think that the choice between "reactive, proactive and versatile" is really what the players come to the game in order to determine, if that's their artistic statement, then yeah taking it out of their hands is deprotagonizing.  But I don't know that I've ever met someone who's wired that way.

And if it's just a constraint similar to "You can get a +2 to your die roll if you somehow work in the word 'Bloviate!' to your description," then we're all fairly accustomed to that, right?

[Adam Dray]

I think it's a little different, Tony. This is more like, "You can only act if you can work the word 'Bloviate!' into your description."

[TonyLB]

I think it's a little different, Tony. This is more like, "You can only act if you can work the word 'Bloviate!' into your description."

Eh.  "You get +2", "You get to act", "You automatically win every conflict forever" ... it's all just incentives.  If I'm given an incentive to work 'Bloviate' in then I can work it in.

It's different from a situation where I came in with my creative goal being 'I'm going to play an honest, forthright character' and then I get told 'You can only act if you cheat and steal'.  That would be deprotagonizing.  Word-choice, or choice between react/proact/versatile, don't strike me as those same types of choices.