[Change] Countering the drive towards generic traits?

[DWeird]

Hi,

I've recently begun work on Change, a simulation of fantasy cultures. A few early playtests have rolled in, and something troubling emerged: there is ample reason for players to make traits, the backbone of the game, as generic as possible.

A few words on the general system first. For each culture, there are three columns, ten items each: Defining traits, Regular traits, and Peripheral traits. The type of trait decides its power and ability to shape the game - defining ones are the most powerful, regular traits less so, and peripheral traits are essentially unusable traits in cooldown. Most of the game goes by facing Challenges of various sorts. Traits can be used to decrease (or increase) the roll made against a Challenge's difficulty. Winning or losing a Challenge creates new traits - winning a Challenge gets you good, useful traits, losing a Challenge gets you poor, hindering traits. You get more traits the harder the Challenge was. Basically, after a challenge, you roll a number of d10s - and the numbers that come up show which regular trait-slot gets hit. You either create new regular traits, or change the quality level of old ones. If you roll double, you get a new Defining trait. You're more likely to roll doubles the more difficult the Challenge is.

Regular traits cycle in their usefulness - they go from poor to neutral to good, which means a once poor trait can become a usable one, and a once good trait can become a hindering one. Using a trait for a bonus knocks it down a notch, using it for a malus gives the trait a bonus.

Defining traits have no such cycle, and stay at the level they were created - either good or bad. Good traits give you a bonus every other turn, bad traits give you a malus every other turn.


Most of the game revolves around spending traits to increase a Challenge roll. To use a trait to increase said roll, you have to narrate what exactly you're hoping to achieve with the use of that trait - basically, the trait in question has to "make sense". For instance, if sewer-dwelling ratmen wanted to bribe & blackmail city officials to be able to walk around in broad daylight, they could use their Cunning, their Treasure Hoard, and their Thieving ways. On the other hand, "Poisonous fangs" or "Diseased" are not traits that are easily applicable to such a situation.

So here's the issue: the requirement for something "making sense" means that you want to make your traits as generic as possible, so you would be able to apply the trait in the broadest set of situations possible. This is bad, as I want the traits to be evocative and as special and unique as possible. This is less of an issue for regular traits - as a rule, you have more of them, meaning that you have a larger pool to choose from, and they change around more often (old regular traits can become peripheral traits and vice versa), meaning that you won't be stuck with a single trait for that long, and they change around in quality, meaning you'll get to use the same trait in a larger variety of situations (both where the trait is useful and where it is not).

Defining traits, on the other hand, are stuck in whatever rating they were created in, and once one is created, you are likely to spend the most of the game with it. And since these traits are very very useful, you want to use them as often as you can, which means making them generic instead of special. So called defining traits are thus not "defining" at all. You don't make "Master Lancers", you make "Fighters", you don't make "Clockmakers", but "Master Crafters", you don't make "Gemstone dealers", but "Treasure." The general gist of the more awesome trait is thus preserved, but a lot of cool colour is lost.

Since my game is very much about creating cool colour on the fly, this is a serious head scratcher for me. To play the game the way it is intented to be played is to create lots of cool little details and then explore how they relate to each other. To play the game as it is written is to intentionally ignore details in favour of more general, more widely applicable ideas.

What do I do?

[Chris Flood]

I'm running into a similar problem running my homebrew MULRAH, which took trait idea from FATE's Aspects, Risus's Cliches, and PDQ's Qualities. Risus's comedic bent, which allows for "Dishwasher" to be invoked in an aerial dogfight, makes more specific traits humorous and thus encouraged. PDQ simply calls for GM fiat ("No, 'Superior Demigod' is too broad."). Unfortunately, comedy and saying "no" are not what I'm going for in MULRAH.

FATE's Aspects seem to have something to them that I haven't totally wrapped my head around and that actually makes specificity better within the game mechanics. I'm going to be looking into it more and will post any feedback I find.

[Noclue]

DW, Dogs in the Vineyard has a similar incentive toward generic traits and it does absolutely nothing to stop you from making traits generic as hell. However, folks seem to gravitate toward more specific traits over time because the game is more fun that way. The rules won't stop you from ruining your own fun if you insist on doing it, but why would you want to do that?

So, is your game truly more fun for the players if they make specific traits? Does that fun compensate for the times when a generic trait would have been relevant and the specific trait is not? If so, you may not have to do anything other than tell the players that they should make specific traits.

[DWeird]

Mulrah: Thanks! Two heads are better than one, eh?

Noclue: Yes, I totally expect the players to create traits as specific as they can, because creating colourful detail is pretty much where the payoff is. Well, that, and the system's ability to surprise you with the emergent big picture of the group you're making.

This game is basically of two halves: one is supposed to harness the player's raw creativity to create as different cultures as possible - a diverging force. The other (which I have ignored in my post because it has little to do with my current issues) is about the common world influencing the cultures that inhabit it in ways that ties the cultures together and shows what common problems they had to address - a converging force.

Several playtests have shown that there are stopgaps to divergence without even the second half of rules coming into play. Like... Regular traits need to such that are not straightforwardly good or bad, but can be "good", "neutral" and "poor", which makes people scratch their heads, especially when they have to make up a number of new traits on the same turn. I wouldn't even be worried, but I often see the same traits popping up in different, unrelated playtests. For instance, "Isolated" has seen use in three independent playtests at least. Granted, I used it as an example in the pdf, but still... I expected people to easily make new stuff up.

What really worries me is a thing one of my most dedicated players said. He played the game a couple of times with a friend of his, and, when I was asking him about it, described "learning to make the Defining traits more generic" as a step on the learning curve he and his friend had to take in order to make the game work properly. It was a game of clockmakers with robot armies against a group of dragon tamers, and he had to change "Clockmakers" to "Master Crafters" because it was, while not impossible, frustrating and non-fun to think up new ways to apply "Clockmakers" every other turn.


I'm not really looking for ways to encourage difference and specificity, because if I make any rule about it, play will converge around it instead of diverging from it... But I am looking for advice on making up more specific traits less of a burden on the overall effectiveness of a group.

[greyorm]

In ORX, I ran into the same problem: how do I avoid broad, generic traits while making narrow, specific traits useful? I knew I didn't want to get into silly ranking systems dividing categories by cost or complexity or both, because those never seem to work out and create more arguments and headaches than anything else.

I solved the puzzle using backwards narration: FIRST you decide which traits to roll and roll them, THEN you decide what's going on and what happened. I'm not sure it ever came out that clearly in the text, but it was meant to make it so no trait was ever useless or underused because the players decide what trait they're using (and how), and the situation is crafted according to that and the results of the rolls.

In more constrained games where the overall situation is building and it would be tough to work a scene in with the changes necessary to invoke a trait in some specific way, all one has to do is tag the trait in narration in some way.

For example, even a "Deadly Warrior" trait can be invoked for more than combat, even just "his deadly warrior's stare", as long as the idea gets pumped in the narration. "Dishwasher" I imagine could be invoked in a dog-fight not because the skills of the dishwasher directly relate to blasting planes out of the sky, but just by referencing it: "And Beetle cried out, 'Damnit! I'm a dishwasher, not a dog-fighter!' " or something even more obscure and clever.

[DWeird]

greyorm: That sounds a little bit iffy at first look, especially the "Dishwasher" example... How does it work in play? Are goofy or lackluster trait uses common? Also, how many traits at a time usually get invoked?

I'd like to stress that I'm not discounting the idea altogether... 'Regular' practise of "say what it means first, then roll and see what happens" produces it's own share of players taking liberty with a trait's initial meaning.This happens most often when a player is hurting for traits and scraps up everything he can... Using dwarf skins for leather armour because you have a "Dwarf skins" trait, not because said skins are of any "real" use as established prior in the game.

Mind, these can be cool things - extending a trait's immediate meaning, like "Fear of disease" used as if it represents not only a sentiment, but some knowledge of how to counter diseases and applying such knowledge zealously, or applying a trait that turns a disadvantage on its head - using "Isolated" to create trade routes because it makes the goods your group produces more rare and thus valuable.


Also, I think I may have a solution to my own problem - I've been tinkering with the rules in an attempt to adjust the Challenge difficulties, and started thinking of Defining traits, in sum, as a flat reduction of difficulty to a Challenge roll... So now that's exactly what they are!

Every good d-trait gives you a +1 to every roll you make.
Every bad d-trait gives you a -1 to every roll you make.
To invoke the total bonus, you have to use one and only one of the good defining traits, and for your rivals to invoke the total malus, they have to use one and only of the bad defining traits.

Say we have this group:

Ironclads++
Seahardy++
Skin Merchants++
Reckless--
Ghost Ships--

So, if they wanted to, go all pirate on an enemy fleet, they'd only have to use "Seahardy" for a total bonus of +3, and the enemy fleet would only have to use "Reckless" for a total malus of (-2).

This way, the d-traits function similarly to pre-defined "attributes" in other systems - they delineate a vague sphere a character is automatically good at, without the player in question having to explain exactly how and why the ability applies... In fact, you could use something like this in other games:

Strong 3
(Bulging muscles
Master swordsman
Climber)

Is different from:

Strong 3
(Healthy appetitte
Binge drinker
Hard-headed)

So every new mini-trait grants you not only a flat increase to the overall ability, but a new area of application for it as well. Which sorta makes sense, I believe.

[greyorm]

greyorm: That sounds a little bit iffy at first look, especially the "Dishwasher" example... How does it work in play? Are goofy or lackluster trait uses common? Also, how many traits at a time usually get invoked?

I'm not sure I understand your meaning regarding how it looks "iffy".

However, the dishwasher example is a perfect showcase of how they're supposed to be used in ORX play. (I use an example of "Wolfskin Cloak" when I'm introing the game, and how you can tag it just by passively using the cloak in your narration: that is as JUST character description like "...and as he leaps from the cliff down onto the giant's shoulders, battleaxe raised, Frell's wolfskin cloak ripples and snaps in the icy wind." and you get to roll the die for it.)

It works in play because I gave up trying to think of things in relative power, and started to think about their narrative power. That is, normally, we think: "A dragon is huge, breathes fire, giant claws, eats people, and therefore we have to give it the best dice/scores and make it really dangerous." Or we think "A battle-axe is more dangerous than a dagger. And definitely more dangerous than bare hands."

I tossed that thinking entirely for this design. So a dragon can be given the smallest die size available in the game, it just means it isn't a big threat right then and there. It doesn't mean the dragon isn't dangerous, it means the danger level from the dragon is minimal and it's potential influence on the direction of the narrative is small.

Depending on the group and the chosen mood of the game, the traits (I call them "descriptors") chosen vary in style. The guiding rule is that they are supposed to be things that say something about your character. They're his (or her) hooks, what people remember about the character -- whether that is certain skills, a type of/specific dress or armament, notable looks or mannerisms -- and important story bits.

You only get a few at first, though you can buy more later in the game, for a (increasing) price. (And some injuries can cause you to lose one entirely.)

How many people invoke is an interesting question because I knew I needed to limit the number that could be tagged, but I didn't want to set a hard limit or prevent someone from deciding to roll all of them at once if they wanted to. Instead, the more you tag, the higher the chance of your taking an "injury" (which is a completely separate event from whether or not you succeed -- you can succeed and be injured, or fail and be injured); as well, during any Scene, you can only tag each once. Most folks, in practice, only tag at most two or three per roll (note: you also have to narrate each into the conflict being resolved).

I don't know if any of that will help you with your particular design as it may not mesh with your own goals for play (mine were biased towards heavy mechanical strategizing and supporting the production of colorful narratives), but there it is, in case any of it does.

I'd like to stress that I'm not discounting the idea altogether... 'Regular' practise of "say what it means first, then roll and see what happens" produces it's own share of players taking liberty with a trait's initial meaning.This happens most often when a player is hurting for traits and scraps up everything he can... Using dwarf skins for leather armour because you have a "Dwarf skins" trait, not because said skins are of any "real" use as established prior in the game.

My thoughts on this: players are going to break your game if they're going to break your game: you can't legislate the social contract. Trust your players to do what's right. And if you don't trust them, why are you playing together (or playing that game together)?

I also feel inventiveness and creativity should be rewarded, not punished. ("You can't do that with that!" should instead be "It is awesome that you did that with that!" so all that wriggling and reaching and scraping for more is a positive that should be encouraged, not restricted and curtailed. YMMV.)

[DWeird]

I can see how "iffy" is not the best of descriptors. What I meant by it was this: when you use a trait in a such a way, it produces no change, no effect, except for a passing one-liner. If I had to take a guess, I think it works in your game because at some point, the traits used in an "iffy" way get used for something genuinely awesome... All the prior "iffy" uses of it then gain meaning as if they were building up to this moment, and all the "iffy" uses that come after it get coloured by this deed.

For instance, your wolfskin cloak example seems terribly boring to me (no offense!). But, say, if at some point in time Fred used that wolfskin cloak to choke a dragon to death - yeah, it going ripple and crack in the icy wind is pretty cool. So it may be a sucky rule for some particular instances, but good for the whole of the game...

However, my game isn't about narrative as much as it is about, uh, freestyle sociology. This means that relative power matters, at least fiction-wise. I'm not trying to build in a trait ranking system - 'Hole in the ground+' is as good a trait as 'Floating Castle with a flying crocodile moat+' is, but fiction-wise, the hole in the ground can't be used for actions that involve floating around, or taking the brunt of an enemy's assault head on. Explaining how the hole in the ground helps you win the conflict is part of the pleasure of explaining how that particular society works, and going "yeh, there are holes in the ground here" would not be very conductive towards that.

In fact, you helped me realize that my major goal here isn't traits as descriptive and specific as can be, but rather traits that are optimally descriptive and specific for the purpose of explaining how a society works. Which isn't as straightforward, sadly enough.


My worry with the number of traits invoked was that having too much of them at a time would crowd the memory of a player too much. Currently, the mechanic of my game is - 1) use traits for roll bonus, decrease them by a rank; 2) roll aftermath dice, and further decrease/increase traits (depending on whether you lost or won the challenge), or create new ones. Waiting until the conflict is over to resolve and explain both of these trait adjustments would tax the memory beyond the point at which doing so is effortless... And I expect 5-6 traits to be pinged on an average turn during the mid-game. I find it's much easier to remember each item you used when you have the broad outline of "what happened" in the game...

Granted, cutting out the two-step (i) "What I plan to do" + ii) "What happened afterwards") system would likely lessen bookkeeping, which is kind of a burden right now... And obviously, I don't want the players to feel compelled to throw every trait they have into every challenge they face. A sort of "the more traits you put up, the higher the risk" system that you described would likely work well here, but I don't yet know on how to put it in without screwing the game up... Maybe the players risks only the traits he uses in a challenge? That's very straightforward, but there are really cool moments when a challenge's aftermath produces results that aren't straightforward, by hitting a semi-random trait that did not have a clear connection to the conflict at hand.

My thoughts on this: players are going to break your game if they're going to break your game: you can't legislate the social contract. Trust your players to do what's right. And if you don't trust them, why are you playing together (or playing that game together)?

I also feel inventiveness and creativity should be rewarded, not punished. ("You can't do that with that!" should instead be "It is awesome that you did that with that!" so all that wriggling and reaching and scraping for more is a positive that should be encouraged, not restricted and curtailed. YMMV.)

I couldn't help but chuckle at this - see, the dwarfskin armor example was taken from my own actual game, in which I was the player doing the "I need this trait purely for mechanic reasons, so I guess I'll do a hand-wavey explanation on what it has to do with the conflict at hand." That was an underwhelming experience for me - I didn't want to use the trait like that, nor did I want to spend ten whole minutes thinking on how to better use it, but I did want to do good at the conflict, so I did that.

So this isn't about making things I don't like in the game hard... Rather, it's about making things I do like in the game easy.


Oh, and please don't mind the fact that I keep disagreeing with nigh everything you say... This discussion is immensly useful to me - not only in getting the brain juices flowing, but in the specific mechanics you suggested or mentioned.

[otspiii]

I'm not sure if this will work with your system in particular, but it's the way I figure you can encourage specific and descriptive traits in a system like this.  Divide traits up into rough categories of specificity and make more specific ones more powerful.

+1 Bonus: Ultra-Generic (Lucky, Skilled, Capable)
+2 Bonus: Basic (Strong, Fast, Smart)
+3 Bonus: Specific (Mechanic, Selling, Gunman)
+4 Bonus: Super-Specific (Clockmaker, Gemstone Dealer, Trick Shots)

If you want to get fancy you can even do things like let people use traits outside of their definitions for a decrease in power, letting a Clockmaker do non-clock mechanics with a +2 bonus, letting you be specialized without being totally blind to closely related skills.

There's a slight danger inherent in this, like that someone has to make a snap judgment on just how useful any given trait will be pre-play, which can be difficult if you're unfamiliar with the system.  I've spent a while thinking about this all, though, so I can get into some of the specifics I've thought up if you're interested in this line of thought.

[DWeird]

I've been thinking of a variant of this - different traits giving varying levels of bonuses. Mind, that was for a different reason. The game has a rule where, after a winning aftermath dice hits a regular trait that's already at a good(+) level, you replace it with another good(+) level trait, but one that is more powerful, refined, useful fiction-wise than the trait it replaces. "Ore Mines+" could be replaced with "Metalworks+", "Fear of Disease+" could be replaced by "Doctors+". The problem was that there was no mechanical incentive to do so, and the game showed a tendency towards having the groups degenerate into meaner and meaner versions of themselves (there's a negative feedback loop that gives you more usable traits the harder you lose. But it comes at a price: the new usable traits are less powerful, more base, useless versions of the traits they replace. "Joined forces-" becomes "Infighting+", "Rich-" becomes "Spendrift+", and etc.).

Having the new replacement trait be somehow more useful would be a good enough incentive, but I'm vary of the idea. It adds mechanical crunch that steepens the learning curve and makes using the traits less intuitive. The game is taxing enough, and I'm wary of adding any extra elements that increase the, uh, computation burden. I guess I want making specific traits to be easy rather than useful, if that makes any sense.

But the above is more to show that I've thought about the idea of "traits have levels of differing usefulness" than "traits have levels of differing usefulness that is tied to their level of specifity/genericness", which is what you suggested...

Another issue is that a single +4 is really a lot, at least on mostly d10-based challenges, which is what I have. I'd rather like to keep to a single type of die - keeps the investment players have to make into the game beyond the game text to a minimum. 'specially since I think my major audience does not coincide exactly with the current gamer population. And I'm not sure how scaled specificity would work without a proper power scale.

So no, I'm not likely to use the mechanic you proposed just the way you proposed it. Not so much an outright dismissal as a fair share of variness - introducing it would change the mechanics quite a bit and would create problems I don't yet know how to solve. However, I am a sucker for a "But wait! There's more!" line - never know if the next thing that's going to be said isn't the thing you oh so desperatelly need, so please do elaborate.

[otspiii]

Yeah, I figured a +4 was a little too big for this rule-set.  A few other ways you could do it would be to have it change die size, or be usable a set number of times per session, or something else that's not a straight-up bonus.  None of these are things you can really just toss in as changes with just an afterthought, though.

The "But there's more. . .!" is less more content than more refinement.  It's just stuff like making sure there's a limit to how many traits you can use so the best strategy isn't just to take a ton of 'Lucky' traits and get a flat but decently high bonus to everything you do, things like that.

[Teataine]

I solved the puzzle using backwards narration: FIRST you decide which traits to roll and roll them, THEN you decide what's going on and what happened.

One question: what, if anything, stops the players from rolling their best stats every time and then finding some half-assed explanation for them being included?

[chance.thirteen]

Since I always like numbers to solve things, another approach is to make up some formula that determines the value of a given trait. In general, the more specific the application of the trait, the higher the bonus you can afford. You can also modify that by how useful the trait is if you so desire.

I will make up numbers here:

+1 10 pts
+2 20 pts
+3 40 pts

(note I make the highest value very pricey)

Not directly applicable to warfar: -3/10
Awesome feel: -1/10

Applicable:

Rarely (around 10% of situations): X1
Sometimes (around 25% of situations): X3
Often (around 50% of sitautions): X6

So your average trait is say +2 (20 pts), and applicable sometimes, X3 = 60 pts. If it were not related to warfare, it would be 14 base, for 42 pts. If that was also awesomely creative, then the base would be 20-3-1, for 13 base, X3 for 39 pts.

You wanna give 10 traits, so give a budget of 600 pts of traits.

Then make up many common examples of each category.