Torchbearer: A Mythic Fantasy RPG (1st post, too)

[Shreyas Sampat]

Hi, all.  I'm new to the forum, and I thought I'd make my entrance with a game I'm developing.

It takes ideas from many places, notably Walt Freitag's Symmetry dicing mechanism.

The premise:
The Torchbearers are at the front of a subtle demon war.

In greater depth:
One of the gods of the world ended a war with the Major Evil Force, a cabal of mysterious shapechanging demon lords, by sealing them in a corner of the country with a powerful curse.
The curse is aging, and the demons are testing its failing strength.  They are already escaping out into the civilized world, working on toppling it from inside rather than take it by military conquest.

Terminology:
The players are called simply players.
The players choose one of their number to arbitrate, control the game world, that sort of thing.  This player is the Keeper.  The Keeper is analogous to the GM, Storyteller, that sort of thing.

The system:
Characters are defined by three things, Image, Smoke, and Flame.

The character's Image is simply a phrase that describes him or her, like "Honorable Pirate", "Priest of Veamaandhi", "Sorceress", "Skinchanging Demon Spy".

Any player character has an equal number of Smoke traits and Flame traits.  These may be any descriptive phrases: Stubborn, Strong as an Ox, Follows the Honorable Pirate's Code, Knows Blood Magic", and so forth.  Smoke traits provide penalties to rolls, and Flame traits positive.
I suggest that at least one of each be a relationship the character has, either with other player characters or a group of non-player characters.

In addition to this, the character has some amount of Fuel.  This is probably best represented by tokens of some nature; it's an abstract resource.
Fuel can be used in two ways:
Spend a Fuel to give a +1 bonus to a single test, or spend a Fuel to "Increase Contrast"; this applies for a whole scene, and can be done repeatedly.

Increasing Contrast has the effects of strengthening Smoke and Flame: Each time you do so, for the duration of the scene the magnitude of the modifiers applied by your traits increases by 1.
So, if Vakhriyya has Increased Contrast three times since the begining of the scene, and she does something to which her sword Flame applies and no other modifiers do, rather than a +1 bonus she applies a +4.  Increasing Contrast only applies to the character's own modifiers; if this roll was against a character who was resisting her with his own "Shchang Fencer" Flame, her modifier would be +3, not 0, assuming the second character had not increased his own contrast.

Tests:
To resolve a test, first determine whether the total of its modifiers is positive, zero, or negative.  
When rolling the dice for a test, any Smoke trait that applies gives a negative modifier, and any Flame gives a positive modifier.  So, if Vakhriyya Dawndrinker the Honorable Pirate has the Flame "Grew up with a sword in her hands", then she'd get +1 to rolls involving using her sword.  If she had the Smoke "Not Very Strong", and was trying to cut down something massive with her sword, then the modifiers would cancel each other out.
The acting character always rolls the dice, though other characters may provide modifiers, either by assisting, which adds bonuses from their Flames and penalties from their Smoke, by resisting, which does the opposite,  or by spending Fuel to add a bonus.  No one may spend Fuel to add penalties.

If it is positive or zero, the player narrates the outcome of success and the Keeper narrates the outcome of failure.  (Before the game, everyone should agree what amount of authority any player has to narrate.)
If it is negative, then vice versa.

After narration, dice are rolled.
There are two types of dice:
The Core die is a d12 marked on half its faces with a point and two faces with a ring.
Modifier dice are marked on three faces with a point and one face with a ring.

For a test, roll the Core die and a number of modifier dice equal to the magnitude of the modifier of the roll.
Then, for each ring remove that ring and a point.

If the modifier was zero, then a point indicates a success.  Blank or a ring indicates failure.

If the modifier was positive, then exactly one point indicates an unusual success.  More than one point indicates ordinary success.  No points and no rings indicates failure.  Any number of rings indicates unusual failure.

If the modifier was negative, then exactly one point indicates an unusual failure.  More than one point indicates ordinary failure.  No points and no rings indicates success.  Any number of rings indicates unusual success.

Unusual failure or success:  In addition to the narrated outcome, whoever narrated that result can add a fact.  This fact can be anything that the narrator has the authority to narrate.  This can grant a character a temporary Smoke or Flame; this trait disappears at the end of the scene.

Example: Vakhriyya is fighting Vikakr Face-Blackened-by-Fire.  She wants to try to disarm him.  The Keeper calls for a test.
Vakhriyya has positive modifiers, so she narrates her success:
"I strike Vikakr sharply on the wrist.  He drops his sword at his feet."
The Keeper narrates her failure:
"Vakhriyya strikes at Vikakr's wrist, but he drops his hand, parrying the blow."
If Vakhriyya had rolled an unusual success, she might add:
"The blade bites deeply into his arm."
The Keeper might rule that this gives Vikakr the Smoke "Crippled Weapon Hand" for the duration of the scene.

Characters and Death:
Only the player of a character may narrate his death if the character has any Fuel.  If the character runs out of Fuel, anyone with Fuel (and the Keeper, who might not have a character of his own) may narrate the character's death.

Characters and Magic: Torchbearer is a fantasy game, so I had to put in a discussion on this.  Magic is probably best expressed as a Flame, though it could simply be narrated by the player, or indicated through the use of Fuel.

Genreally, a character starts with some smallish amount of Fuel, and Fuel returns to characters at breaks in the story, like when the heroes are sailing over the peaceful Sea of Years, or stopping to plan their assault on the fortress.  Fuel could also be used as a reward.

What do y'all think?  If someone would want to run some numbeers on my mechanic, too, for probabilities of unusual success or failure as well as ordinary success and failure, I'd be hugely grateful.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Looks like despite narrationprivileges given to players, the GM has to do the most of the work. How can the GM keep up cool descriptions in the end? Could I suggest that the characters always narrate? Couldn't the players suggest smoke instead of the GM? Then have some deciding mechanism to regulate how big it could be?

About the premise. Seems a bit flat at first glance, but you didn't write much about it. But as it stands it doesn't make me jump at playing it. Sounds like a tame version of Warhammer.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Oh and welcome to the Forge too. Forgot to say that.

[Shreyas Sampat]

As for the premise, I agree that I wrote it out insipidly.  The game's intended to be very setting-dependent.  Here's another angle on the premise that's a little less like Every Rules-Light Fantasy RPG:

You are a leihesju, a human with a little shard of divine essence.  It's not enough to make you immortal, or give you any of the other traditional marks of power, but it makes you strong, and it makes you bleed like a god, in gold or blue or black.
The spark of divinity has marked you in other ways too - maybe you always smell of freshly crushed grapes, or your eyes are impossibly blue.  Whatever it is, you have known your whole life which god marked you.  Sometimes, you sense the motions of your god's mind, but usually the Divine will is closed to you.
As an agent of the immortals, the commons have come to treat you as a local hero, and have started to expect you to protect them.  Now you start hearing rumours of skinchangers escaping from Kuei-tzu Mu.  Duty calls.

Perhaps you're right about the narration privileges; it's possible to give the majority of them to players.
The players could indeed suggest smoke and the like, though I'd like to encourage in-game thinking rather than metagame thinking... "I should try to cut his court ties"  rather than "What if I cancelled his Court Ties Flame?"
I didn't want to assign magnitudes to Smoke and Flame to prevent the intrusion of numbers, though maybe it's not the worst of ideas.  I hoped that the small effect of a single trait would encourage players to seek actions that involve more than one - Inigo Montoya seeking out the Six-Fingered Man, and so forth.

[Mike Holmes]

Looks like despite narrationprivileges given to players, the GM has to do the most of the work. How can the GM keep up cool descriptions in the end?

???

The same way they do in 95% of all RPGs.

There is a disturbing phrase up there. It says:

(Before the game, everyone should agree what amount of authority any player has to narrate.)

Will you be including more guidance on what that means? It seems a pretty loose statement. But it's very important. It's my opinion that games that don't regulate closely the ability to use director stance types of power are problematic. I like allowing players some director stance authority. But I like it to be in small, precisely defined boxes. For example, description of combat effects, so long as they match the mechanical effects seems a great idea.

Narrating whatever, as long as the players agree before hand, seems to be dangerous to me. They might say that anything is OK, perhaps. In which case, one wonders why use the system at all? Or they may restrict narrative power to just fluff, leaving all real resolution in the GM's hands.

Decide on an acceptable box, and stick with it. Or at the very least, include in your text a discussion of the potential ramifications of such a decision and how to come to one wisely.

Just how I see it.

Mike

[Walt Freitag]

Hi Willows, and welcome to the Forge!

I'll take a look at the numbers. The ring rule will complicate the caclulations quite a bit, but I suspect the end result will be pretty well-behaved. However there may be some surprises, for example it appears there will be more unusual successes/failures than normal ones at a +1/-1 modifier.

Before I go any farther, I have to check: are the modifier dice also d12s?

Also, am I correct in reading this as that two outcomes, for success and failure, are always both narrated before the dice are rolled? I think this should be tried and I've been waiting for someone to attempt it outside Zak's Shadows. Yet I'm curious why you chose it for this particular game. I could see it becoming part of the game's color, such as that the characters' divine taint includes being able to 'see' the two (or more) immediate futures diverging from a decision point. Did you have something like this in mind, or is the dual narration (if I'm interpreting it corrrectly that way at all) purely a metagame phenomenon?

- Walt

[Shreyas Sampat]

Thanks for the numbers.  I was examining them myself earlier, and I did notice that the low modifiers tend to have high unusual success/failure frequency.  On the other hand, this may not be a bad thing; I was considering posing that unusual success/failure only occur on exactly one modifier die; this would flatten that curve a bit, but complicate the calculations yet further.

The modifiers are indeed d12s.

You're also correct about the outcomes being narrated before the dice are rolled.  This could certainly become part of the colour - I hadn't thought of that.  The reason I chose to do that wasn't precisely color, but certainly atmosphere.  This morning, I did think of a way to incorporate the divine taint more thoroughly: through use of Fuel.  The marks that a character bears could become more apparent when he draws upon Fuel, which becomes representative of divine energy.  That does rather make me want to say that Fuel should return to the character slowly rather than in discrete chunks, and there should probably be some harder rules on total Fuel reserves, but as it is I'm comfortable with the outline of Fuel usage, and will have to playtest it.
I do like the idea that the spark allows players to know certain things; perhaps this can be fleshed out into something more useful.

As for narrative control, this is difficult.  I'll have to figure something out, though I'd really like to leave a good portion of Director power in the players' hands.  One possible solution would be to take the Puppetland approach and disallow players to speak in metagame terms, so the GM is forced to keep his hand on the pure mechanical elements of the system.  I also like the possibility that players only narrate the outcomes that their traits influence: if a character has only a Flame affecting a roll, then he may narrate the success but not the failure.  If he has Smoke and Flame affecting it, he narrates both.  Then, for resisted and assisted actions, the second participant could also narrate outcomes, if the active participant is not narrating both of them already.
Another option might be to define more of the character's purpose in the story, and let players narrate events that involve the purpose.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi 'willows,

I'm thinkin' ... is there any reason for Smoke and Flame traits to be designated as wholly positive and wholly negative?

I'm thinkin' that this option might provide more descriptive flexibility in play: a trait is just "a trait," such that it has potential Smoke qualities (negatives) and Flame qualities (positives) as relevant to given situations. Thus my Pride is "smokey" in a tense negotiation situation and "flamey" during a duel for my honor.

I recommend taking a peek down in the Alyria forum - Seth has developed a fascinating, powerful system and setting in which many of the concerns evident in your design have been hammered into shape. Much of his suffering can work to your benefit in shaping Torchbearer.

Best,
Ron

[Shreyas Sampat]

Aside: It seems that wherever this phrase goes, it very rapidly gets trimmed to 'Willows.

Ron,

The reason that Smoke and Flame traits are designated as wholly positive or negative is simple, in my mind.  If a trait is complex enough and important enough to the character to have mechanical consequences in both directions, then it's important enough to take up two slots.  Perhaps this is something that I should put in my description of Traits when I collect this material into a pretty document.

I actually had a nearly identical example to yours of this in action:
Our pet example character, Vakhriyya Dawndrinker, has Honourable Pirate's Code as both a Smoke and Flame trait.  When dealing with matters of reputation and "face", it serves as an advantage; she is known to be a generally civil person.  On the other hand, it impedes her from even attempting actions outside the Code, and her reputation is widespread among the civil authorities.

[Andrew Martin]

If a trait is complex enough and important enough to the character to have mechanical consequences in both directions, then it's important enough to take up two slots.  Perhaps this is something that I should put in my description of Traits when I collect this material into a pretty document.

I've got an example of a player using a PC's disadvantage (Hard of Hearing) as an advantage. How would this fit in your system? It would seem illogical to duplicate every trait, solely to label them either Smoke or Flame.

[Henry Fitch]

Maybe there could be a Fuel cost for using a Smoke trait as a Flame trait? And you could get some Fuel back if you do the opposite?

By the way, Increasing the Contrast is extremely cool.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Andrew, Henry,

I think I can reply to these both together.
Considering your shadow-of-an-example, Andrew, I came up with the first half of Henry's idea, using Fuel to reverse the effect of a negative trait.  I like this because it maintains the distinction between characteristics that are obviously positive and negative, but does something to blur the line for storytelling purposes.  I feel that a character using something like a physical infirmity to his advantage should be unusual and special, and so Fuel usage is appropriate.

As for the second idea, I like this less - Fuel should be a constantly depleting resource.  But I do think it's possible to put a different spin on this, which resembles an Alyria mechanic a lot (though I thought of it before I actually read the Alyria rules): Fuel could be spent to use another PC's advantages against him.  An example might be where two characters are fencing (yes, I do use combat examples a lot), and one has the Flame "Master of X Fencing Style", or something to that effect.  The other could spent Fuel and go into a traditional series of attacks, to tempt the other into the traditional series of parries, and then change one of the later attacks once the pattern was established, to capitalize on the fencer's expectation of a different attack.

[Jonathan Walton]

Now you start hearing rumours of skinchangers escaping from Kuei-tzu Mu.  Duty calls.

Okay, I got "Kuei-tzu" ("gui-zi" in pinyin) as "demon," but what's "Mu"?  Wood?  Eye?  Mother?  Curtain?  Grave?

This is what happens when you play with tonal lanuages... ;)

I actually really like the sound of your core concepts.  It sounds "mythic fantasy," but not really in the traditional Euro-centric Tolkien-ripoff sense (or even the Exalted, exotified-eastern wuxia Final Fantasy sense).  More like D&D meets Nobilis meets the Upanishads or something.  I'll be interested to see what you do with it.

Later.
Jonathan

[kevin671]

It sounds kinda cool.  Oh...I've forgotten my bloody manners....Welcome to the Forge.

O.K.  so...the Traits listed under "Smoke" and "Flame", they are assigned numbers...and these numbers have some game effect such as modifying rolss...am I catching this right?

[Jonathan Walton]

O.K.  so...the Traits listed under "Smoke" and "Flame", they are assigned numbers...and these numbers have some game effect such as modifying rolss...am I catching this right?

As I understand it, Flames give you +1, Smokes give you -1, and then you have the option of raising the Contrast (which flat-out rocks, as a mechanic), which basically gives you a multiplier.  No numbers for Traits; you either have them or you don't.

But then I could be completely wrong.  It's happened before ;)

And welcome to the Forge, Willows, by the way.

Later.
Jonathan