[Hex Rangers] Strange Fruit revisited

[Callan S.]

Perhaps the players shouldn't be put in charge of describing the magic and scope of effect?

[Marshall Burns]

Y'know, I really don't want to have the GM do it, but I still can't verbalize exactly why.

[Callan S.]

Hmmm

Have a look at this.

Particularly this line

understanding just how much potential violation can be injected at one time.

I'm thinking that in terms of magic description, here.

[JoyWriter]

Y'know, I really don't want to have the GM do it, but I still can't verbalize exactly why.

Cos making this stuff up is supposed to be part of the fun, and you want to share that fun with all the players? It's like why you don't want the GM deciding what the characters will risk, he gets his own fun, they get theirs.

The key to this is probably showing players why your view on magic is substantial goodness, and then they will be able to use the mechanics you've given happily to unleash that goodness.

Now ideally game-play itself would show them, although I'm not sure that's in there yet, but if you can get the GM and players to get a starting incling of the whys of your vision, for example how magic is personal and creepy and hides in the places respectable thought doesn't touch, and how understanding it requires a certain amount of empathy, then they can move in tune with the game rather than fighting it.

But don't forget to do that second part; show them in game why these restrictions are beneficial/personally enriching/engaging/whatever, and you won't need to police them much.

[David Berg]

That's gonna take some thinking about. "Speak Egyptian backwards" is really cool. "Shoot laser beams" isn't. Somewhere, there's an identifiable divide here.

Well, here's one point:
1) Anachronism is bad.  Don't use anything that reminds the players of modern tech or entertainment.
I dunno how many such points would need listing in order to provide a usable "color guide"... but, y'know, it's an idea...

Personally, I would have also gussed:
2) Cultural importation is bad.  Don't use anything that reminds the players of Asia, Africa, or anywhere not America.
Thus, speaking Iroquois backwards is cool, but speaking Egyptian backwards isn't.

I'd like to try another example if you think this is at all useful.  How about:

Skull-fuck a raccoon to make lightning strike the thief.

Y'know, I really don't want to have the GM do it, but I still can't verbalize exactly why.

Which part of the process are we discussing?  I assumed it went like:

1) In being introduced to the game, players & GM are given some guidelines on how magic works & looks.
2) In play, GM busts out an example.
3a) In play, players decide to do a ritual.  Players talk about what they might do to accomplish their aims.  GM reminds them of the aforementioned guidelines if necessary.
3b) Players narrate their characters performing a ritual.
3c) GM maybe looks up something in a rulebook and then makes a decision on the ritual's outcome.  He then narrates whatever the player characters can observe of this outcome.

In this session, I specifically told the players that when they rested to replenish their chips, the situation would get one step worse, and thus they were running against the clock. I'm not sure what influence this had on their decision-making, but they did seem reluctant to replenish until absolutely necessary. Combined with a tendency to push a little harder than was prudent in conflicts, they had a few moments where they nearly had to let the villain get away due to lack of resources.

I suspect you made a good call in telling them.  You might want to make that an official game rule.  It'd be neat to try some play with and without this, but I dunno if you get enough playtest opportunities.

I don't have an explanation. I don't really know why. The players led their characters toward conflicts exclusively – they never declared any risky thing outside of a conflict – but that's no reason why I can't introduce a risk on my own.

Oh.  NOW I get why it wasn't used.  I thought a Risk was a part of a Conflict, not an alternative to it.

What's the logic for when you resolve a situation with Risk mechanics vs when you resolve a situation with Conflict mechanics?  By "logic" I mean both your rationale as the designer, but also (more importantly) "How do I, as player or GM, know when to use which?"

My guess is that most situations that could be Risks could also be "keep just roleplaying a little longer until there is or isn't a Conflict".

[Marshall Burns]

Okay, been thinkin' on this. Hopefully nobody's so tired of waiting that they've given up on the thread.

Color education
A truth that this game has taught me: educating players, through play, in Color that they aren't intimate with is hard. This has also confirmed the notion (which I never really doubted, but it's all up in my face now) that education & appreciation of "the Package" is crucial to fully functional RTD play.

Specific to this game:
In informing players about this game's Package (I still hate that term, but I still haven't thought of an alternative) begins with a pitch that I've been using for a while now, and has (so far) always got a good reaction: "It's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly meets The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." And that's what it is: it's about larger-than-life gunslinging badasses with ambiguous morality, who happen to be paranormal investigators, and the paranormal is of the folk-horror-tale variety. (As opposed to the Cthulhu variety, or the X-Files variety, or the Stephen King variety, or the British ghost story variety.)
(Also, if they're history buffs, I throw in the historical angle. Mostly, though, the historical jollies are all for me)

People get that. Everyone who's into Spaghetti Westerns and dark folk tales (or at least the Tim Burton movie) "gets it" thus far.

The next step after that is chargen. It's a rule in this game that chargen be done at the table, with everyone, and with the GM directly involved: he asks the players leading questions, makes suggestions, and reins in inappropriate contributions. This goes well -- even the "reining in" part, because people (even, so far, first-time roleplayers) understand the idea that the GM has prepared a scenario, and that it's going to have a certain scope, and that contributions need to be within that scope. There aren't many hurt feelings when the leader of a rockabilly band says to a bandmate, "Whoa, sorry, but that accordion just isn't going to work. Would you mind playing piano instead?" (Might the bandleader say, "Whoa, that accordion is crazy, but let's try it anyway and see what happens"? Yes, of course. That's a real phenomenon that happens literally and metaphorically, but it's not pertinent to the issue at hand because said issue isn't an issue for people who want to try that. It's an issue for the rockabilly purists, so to speak.)

My favorite part of chargen, and what I consider the most crucial part, comes at the end. Here's the thing: Hex Rangers are hand-picked, and it's always because they encountered some supernatural threat and survived. So now we have to establish that encounter. What was the supernatural thing? What happened? How'd the character survive? This is done through back-and-forth between the player and GM, with the GM continuing his task of leading questions, suggestions, and reining in the inappropriate, until both the player and GM are satisfied with the tale. Once this is done, the players have a good idea of what sort of things they're likely to go up against, how they're likely to behave, and in what sorts of ways they can be dealt with.

An example from this last session:
One character had been a prostitute. One of her johns turned out, once the moon came up, to be a werewolf -- Krystal first said a demon, but I pointed out that, in this game, demons (properly "devils") are concerned only with claiming souls by tempting people to sin and, while they're still damned, leading them to die. The PC was already a prostitute, so not much tempting needed to be done there; I suggested a werewolf instead, and Krystal was into that.

She wanted her character to kill the werewolf, and was trying to figure out how to justify the silver. I pointed out that a.) the silver thing was made up for the old movie The Wolfman and had no real basis in folklore, and b.) there are many werewolf legends*, which attribute various weaknesses, strengths, and origins to werewolves, and that, in this game, all of them were true: it was just a question of which kind of werewolf you're dealing with.

(*My favorite is the one where you become a werewolf by donning the skin of a hanged man, and you are invulnerable until that skin is destroyed while you're not wearing it.)

"So how do you kill a werewolf?" she asked.
"On average? The same way you kill anyone else. It's just hard because werewolves are fast, strong, cunning, and really fucking scary."

So she kicked him in the crotch (me & James simultaneously quoting: "Wolfman's got nards!") then killed him with a razor. Which established that, even when dealing with the paranormal, the straight-forward, practical approach sometimes works, and is at least worth a try when you're in trouble.

Following that step, I hand the players a copy of the Hex Rangers Priorities & Code of Conduct, and explain that they're allowed to break it; they just don't want to get caught. Then we start playing, and I throw in an intro conflict to explain the mechanics to new players. Thus far in the process of the game, everyone is on board and getting it. Those who didn't quite get it at first have been gently guided back onto the trail.

Then we get to the problem area: rituals. Which I have tried to explain, but it becomes apparent once one is attempted that I didn't do a good job. In previous games, Steven and Kourtney got it straight away, but they were both pretty clued-in already to the ideas. In this game, James was on-target but nowhere near the bull's eye, and Krystal was way off.

One problem here that I can't really get around is a lack of in-play example: I can't show them an NPC doing a ritual because, at the start of the game, that would be strictly behind the scenes. It is, however, possible to contrive a scenario in which stumbling onto an NPC's ritual first thing wouldn't short-circuit the investigation process; perhaps scenarios for new players should be constructed in such a way.

Also, perhaps the same GM-player interaction used in chargen should be applied to rituals for first-timers. For some reason, I'm disinclined to do that sort of thing once play proper has begun. The hardcore strategist in me says "Let them hang themselves on their own mistakes, and learn from that!" because that's what I want when I'm playing -- but when you aren't given to understand why a mistake was a mistake, then there's no learning to be done from it. So maybe I just need to get over that impulse.

To JoyWriter

Cos making this stuff up is supposed to be part of the fun, and you want to share that fun with all the players? It's like why you don't want the GM deciding what the characters will risk, he gets his own fun, they get theirs.

Yeah, that's it! Thanks!

To David

Well, here's one point:
1) Anachronism is bad.  Don't use anything that reminds the players of modern tech or entertainment.
I dunno how many such points would need listing in order to provide a usable "color guide"... but, y'know, it's an idea...

Personally, I would have also gussed:
2) Cultural importation is bad.  Don't use anything that reminds the players of Asia, Africa, or anywhere not America.
Thus, speaking Iroquois backwards is cool, but speaking Egyptian backwards isn't.

Point 1 is accurate, but not quite the reason that laser beams are uncool. A bigger problem, I think, is that they're flashy and not at all creepy or horrifying. Also unsubtle, but that's not necessarily a problem: the Bloodfruit Tree bled and screamed like all hell when it got cut, and whipped out elongating roots, but those were a.) scary (that tree has so far got a 100% make-the-players-squirm-in-their-seats ratio) and b.) in an isolated, PCs-and-spirit situation -- a situation in which the blatantly supernatural can be written off as events occurring slightly outside the normal plane of experience. The Hex Rangers are adepts, after all.

But still, that's not quite it. Here's what I'm thinking about: if you look at the accounts of real-world shamen's experiences in other planes, they are presented in terms (symbols) that are understood by the shaman. They talk about arrows and feathers and clouds and things. Even when they get really weird, it's within a certain scope of familiarity. For example, here's a paraphrase of an account I read:

A shaman was in dreaming, and got lost on his way back from the land of the dead. He ended up in a bog that he couldn't find his way out of. He encountered a spirit in the form of a headless man with his eyes in his chest and his mouth in his armpit, and they traveled together, but they still couldn't get out of the bog. So the shaman stole the spirit's iron boots while it slept, and used them to walk up into the sky in order to escape. The spirit woke up and demanded that the shaman return the boots; he refused. So the spirit threw a glove at the shaman, and the glove ripped a piece off of his dreaming cloak then dropped to the ground. The spirit ate the scrap of fabric. The shaman demanded that it be returned, but the spirit said, "No, we've already done enough damage to each other." With the aid of the boots, the shaman eventually made it out of dreaming and into his own body (he had been asleep for weeks), but soon died thereafter, ostensibly from the injury sustained via the spirit eating part of his cloak.

I mean, that's pretty fuckin' wild. But look at the terms it's in: a bog, boots,  walking into the sky, an animate glove, a cloak.

Point 2 is, for me, inaccurate. I'm big on the historical angle, so the collision of cultures within America is important to preserve and present in play. I even like to think about expatriate supernatural threats -- for example, a troll coming across from Denmark. That being said, I'd rather have a scenario about an Incan mummy than an Egyptian one, but that's probably just because Incan mummies don't get the screen-time they deserve.

I'd like to try another example if you think this is at all useful.  How about:

Skull-fuck a raccoon to make lightning strike the thief.

My judgment on the ritual is that it ain't great. I can't see any conceptual link between the ritual and the effect; it feels random.
The effect, however, is excellent. Precisely the right scope: something that could happen by chance, that could be written off as natural by the naive. It would be especially cool if this ritual was used to identify who the thief was, because it was the only ritual that the character knew that could pick out an unknown thief. (It's assumed that the PCs know what they are doing with their rituals. They are adepts, and have learned countless rituals; it's the players who make them up, not necessarily the characters.)

And yes, I do think this is useful. I'd be glad to try other examples and see if we can tease out more solid guidelines from my reactions.

What's the logic for when you resolve a situation with Risk mechanics vs when you resolve a situation with Conflict mechanics?  By "logic" I mean both your rationale as the designer, but also (more importantly) "How do I, as player or GM, know when to use which?"

1. If you've got characters with conflicting aims, and one ain't willing to back down, you go to Conflict -- and either the GM or the player initiates by making an ante, and may in fact be announcing the fact that he is putting himself in conflict (lower-case "c") with the other guy by doing so.

2. When there's a task to be performed, and something bad might happen because of it or during it or if it's done badly, you use the Risk rules.

3. When there's a task to be performed, and there's no bad thing might happen, it just works.

I felt that these three situations were sufficiently different, and had different accentuation and treatment in the source fiction, that they needed different rules. #1 is a matter of bending one person's will to your own, by beating them into submission if necessary; #2 is a matter of putting your balls on the line, or putting someone else in danger; #3 is a matter of being a larger-than-life badass.

[Callan S.]

One problem here that I can't really get around is a lack of in-play example: I can't show them an NPC doing a ritual because, at the start of the game, that would be strictly behind the scenes.

Ouch, you can't do cut scenes showing the NPC's? You can only ever show what PC's see? Jeez, that's being a bit old school hard on yourself, isn't it? Well, if you must, you must, but it is being hard on yourself and group.

Cos making this stuff up is supposed to be part of the fun, and you want to share that fun with all the players? It's like why you don't want the GM deciding what the characters will risk, he gets his own fun, they get theirs.

Yeah, that's it! Thanks!

Except it isn't, because they made their decision on magic and you didn't like their decision.

How I think it works is that A: Everyone follows the lead of someone, like the GM. They don't genuinely make their own choices. That sounds boring, but then there's a take off point where the GM himself, because of events in play, instead of leading, starts following those events himself as much as the players were following him before. This is the take off moment, where the SIS ceases to be owned by any one person in particular and instead everyones following the SIS, GM included, like it's its own entity at the table. The SIS appears to become alive at this point, rather than just being a bunch of fiction that Marshall said, for example.

Or maybe not. But I think there's a definate inconsistancy in the idea that really the players get in on this 'making stuff up fun' and how in this playtest account what they made up wasn't right. I think that inconsistancy is resolved if at first all players, then at some point everyone is following the SIS, where things seem to happen not because someone decided, but if you/the groups follows it, that's where it leads to.

[JoyWriter]

They are adepts, and have learned countless rituals;

Really? When? Because it sounds like playing out an example of that piece of history would be the background needed to set up rituals. It's that classic thing when doing high immersion (which also works for fitting exposition into films): Set up the story so that the characters learning something teaches the players. And generally you will be able to find that if they are playing human beings. An amusing variant on this idea can be seen in fallout.

[Emmadexter1970]

I cannot understand your logic.

[Marshall Burns]

Ouch, you can't do cut scenes showing the NPC's? You can only ever show what PC's see? Jeez, that's being a bit old school hard on yourself, isn't it? Well, if you must, you must, but it is being hard on yourself and group.

Callan,
The game is built on a framework of investigation. Plot-structure-wise, it's a procedural, just with unusual procedures. It's hard to show the players NPC cutscenes without giving away the stuff they're supposed to be investigating (and the mission does succeed or fail based on the players' ability to investigate -- the GM doesn't help them back onto the path. The good news is that both succeeding and failing are cool in fiction terms, thanks to the structural mechanics). I suppose I could do them with, y'know, the villain's face concealed in shadow so you can't tell who he is, but it feels cheesy to do so.

Yeah, that's it! Thanks!

Except it isn't, because they made their decision on magic and you didn't like their decision.

It's not just "making things up." Saying "making things up" above was shorthand. It's a bit more complicated, being closer to "making things up within a specific but somewhat up-for-grabs scope of what is determined to be 'cool' for this game." RTD play is like walking a tightrope: the fun is in doing cool shit on the tightrope without falling off, and your balance is the aesthetic judgment of the table as a whole.

But, yeah, it does start with everyone following someone's lead. A shared understanding of genre has to start with someone, and spread from there (changing and adjusting itself to some degree with each spread, of course).

JoyWriter,
Now, that's a thought.

Emma,
Um, ok. Can I get you to elaborate?

-Marshall

[Callan S.]

Callan,
The game is built on a framework of investigation. Plot-structure-wise, it's a procedural, just with unusual procedures. It's hard to show the players NPC cutscenes without giving away the stuff they're supposed to be investigating

It's the players who are investigating, not the PC's? It must be real life player ability, but at the same time this magic thing must work out? Few! I think your setting yourself two masters there, who both must be obeyed, but who aren't terribly compatable with each others commands. One of them is going to have to be a 'try to obey' rather than a 'must obey', I would think, because it will come up at various times that you can't obey both.

[contracycle]

I had some good experiences with Mage which might be relevant here.  In mage, there is no fixed methodoogy of ritual; the mechanism by which magic is performed is specific to the mages paradigm, and even mages within the same tradition need not share a given paradigm.  This approach has weaknesses, but in terms of actually executed play it worked quite well.  When a PC mage performed a magical act, the explanation of how it was performed was pure, umm.. I wanted to say colour be perhaps it would be best not to at the moment.  Lets just call it improvisational expression.  The way you described the performance of a ritual had little or no meaning in itself, but what it did do was communicate something of your characters worldview to the rest of the group.  As a result, the only valid response to any given magical act was "Cool!".  Every time someone did something you learned a little more about the character they were portraying.

More broadly, I think this is an unsolvable problem.  In a more prosaic example, say you had a character with a History skill trait; there are only two possible approaches.  Either that player now has the right to declaim history as they wish it to be or, more likely, the player is entitled to ask the GM questions about history.  Unless you do actually have an entire history corpus for them to study, which of course you don't, and unless they spent as long studying it as a real expert would, which of course they won't, they can't replicate the effect of being a historical expert except by one of those two methods.  Substitute any topic of in-game expertise you like and this remains the case.

The unavoidable conclusion, therefore, is that you cannot simultaneously leaver players to make it up AND avoid having a recipe system which informs them about what is make-up-able.  Either they can make it up, in which case it may well violate your own expectations, or they must call on some pre-existing data which restricts, informs, and with any luck, inspires.

[charles ferguson]

Charles


Hi Marshal

Sounds very cool.

Maybe magic in Hex Rangers could be as simple as:

1) you (the player) have to describe the ritual (what you do to make the magic work)
2) you (the player) have to describe the effect

with both steps having some concrete laws that show the type of elements they either must or cannot include.


Here's an example of what I mean from a freeform magic system I've come up with for a S&S rpg. I'll confess now that these rules haven't (and may never) see playtesting so YMMV.

The crux of it, so far as it might apply to what you're doing is:

1) PC-specific magical flavour added at chargen which is half rules-defined, half player-defined. This flavour has a mechanical impact, but not at the time of invoking the magic--it only kicks in when the PC wants to heal any wounds. That's any wound, not wounds related to the magic in question.
2) Sorcery in practice is made up on the spot by the players (or GM for non-PC magic). The only proviso is that it must obey the 5 Laws Of Sorcery. These are codified to tell the players & GM what magic "is" in this game. There are no spells lists or "spheres" of magic.

The Details

1) Supernatural Prices
Players pick a Supernatural Price at chargen. This is one of 4 predefined "types" of Price, plus a player-created catchphrase that reflects the price. Catchphrases have no mechanical impact, they just help everyone recognize what that PC's magic might look like.

The Price itself doesn't have any impact on the type of magical effect players can create. Instead, any time a PC with a supernatural price is wounded, they have to perform an activity related to their price before they can recover. This is directly inspired by pool refreshes from TSOY. "Wounds" in this game are reductions to player effectiveness (any reductions).

Basically Price backloads the "magical flavor": that is, rather than having to decide if a declared magical effect is appropriate (legal) for a specific char in the thick of the action, the flavor is applied down the track (ie when healing, which typically happens during housekeeping).


2) The Laws Of Sorcery
These are how the GM/players determine what's legal magic & what isn't. Any sorcerous char or NPC can describe any sorcerous effect they want, as long as it obeys the Laws Of Sorcery. Their purpose is to funnell all magic in play toward a pulp S&S feel.

They are:

1 Sorcery Is Perilous
Anyone who uses or is affected by sorcery in any way, even if the effect is beneficial, has to make a saving throw.

2 Sorcery Is Not Natural
Sorcery always includes an obviously and hair-raisingly supernatural effect. If it doesn't, it won't work until the player does include one (in real time).

3 Sorcery Is Real
Once a sorcerous effect or entity manifests in the world, it's subject to whatever physical hurt and influences normally affect an entity or object or force of that type, although it may resist those hurts & influences far more strongly than its mundane counterpart.

4 Sorcery Needs A Victim
The act of invoking sorcery always has a victim. The default victim is the person/s or object/s the sorcery is affecting. If there's no obvious target the sorcerer is the default victim. The default victim can escape a saving throw if the sorcerer provides a Sacrificial Victim instead.

5 Sorcery Is Cursed
Accepting defeat from any sorcery, whether you are the sorcerer or the victim, inflicts a curse on the defeated character (defeat is a mechanical effect that can be chosen by a player to avoid death or horrible injury).


There's some bells & whistles but those are the fundamentals.

When I wrote the first lines of this post, I was specifically thinking of the Laws of Sorcery. The Prices thing is more of an example of a possible direction to get everyone thinking within a specific framework about what magic is like from the get-go (as well as throwing out an alternative idea for when a mechanical effect needs to kick in).


Cheers, Charles

[Marshall Burns]

Callan,
I should perhaps point out that the magic isn't terribly frequent -- I would consider one or two rituals per session to be ideal -- and is done as either part of the investigation, or as magical combat to deal with the threat once  you've figured out what it is and how to deal with it.

But, yes, there are two things that I must have working for this game to satisfy me. I don't see them as imcompatible. I do see it as difficult, but I'm not afraid of that.

Contracycle,
I think you're pretty much correct about players needing to call on pre-existing data. I don't believe that that necessitates a recipe system, though. That's a cop-out.

[contracycle]

I have to agree that I find recipe systems weak and unsatisyfing, but I struggle to think of anything else.  I would love to see a novel idea for a 'logic of magic' if you will that didn't rely on them; I didn't mean to say that there has to be a this-plus-that recipe system as such, but there need to be some principles which the players can riff off in a way that is mutually and consistently comprehensible.  But especially when you are dealing with things like the peasant supersition stuff you have gone for, there is little in the way of underlying, abstractable principle that you could fall back on.   In the European context, what passes for "folk magic" is a kind of partial multi-generational hand-me-down memory of pre-christian religious concepts, which were never intended to be actual systems of magic even in their original form.  It would be a Herculean task to derive from these some set of principles from which players can extemporise in a consistent manner.

I'm interested in the topic precisely becuase I would be keen to see some new thinking on the topic of magic systems, out of much the same frustrations you experience, I imagine.  But I think the problem you have run into is that same one that causes recipe systems to be resorted to, however unsatisfying they may be.