Four Colors al Fresco

[Ron Edwards]

I'd like to propose some discussion about one of the more ambitious games currently available. It's free, at Woodelf's website, The Impossible Dream. I'm putting this into RPG Theory rather than Indie Design, because I perceive the game as past the design stage - bit of a judgment call, but I also want to encourage "discuss this game" (any role-playing game) topics for this forum.

Before I begin ... the rules are pretty extensive and I may have some things wrong in the following text. Please feel free to correct me. I've also contacted the authors and invited them to join in.

Four Colors al Fresco presents a freaky idea for a game premise: solid Avengers-style or X-Men-style superhero comics, set in Renaissance Italy. That's right. Costumes, zippy names, secret identities, powers, the works, all couched in astrological, hermetic, 1400s state-of-the-art technology and culture. Did I mention that this is very weird? The weirdest part is that it works. The hyper-urban environment, the fascination with gimmicks, and the flamboyant names and personalities, and the bogus-sounding, high-flown powers-jargon all fit just fine. I think. Or maybe it's a crazy idea and I'm just crazy too, I don't know.

The game text and most of the design is aimed at Narrativism throughout. It's very strong and up-front about its goals, which are, "We are creating a comic book here." The uses of Titles, Panel structure, and more all reinforce it, which I think justifies inventing a whole new-system. It isn't simply a freaky setting, which could just as well be played using any existing supers game.

One question is, in terms of game text and presentation, how does one best convey these goals? This is a real problem for Narrativist design, especially since "story" has taken on specific meanings in role-playing culture that include very different things. Contrast games like Sorcerer, Otherkind, and Paladin, which shrug and say, basically, "Get it or don't," with games like Zero, Prince Valiant, and The Window, which lay out their goals in black and white, including procedural steps in some cases.

I tend to let game goals be intuitive and operative, which is to say, I think people can process rules and their consequences far more accurately that I (for instance) can articulate them. The danger of extensive goals-based prose, in my view, is that one can be so busy trying to convert semi-interested readers that one loses the choir. But that's a bias of mine and may not be accurate or useful.  So I'm really interested in others' views about the extent of the explanatory text in Four Colors Al Fresco - its content, I think, is completely clear and consistent, so I'm curious about whether it works in terms of when it's applied and how much.

I like the concept that planetary descriptors (attributes) are external to the characters: influences, not "qualities" in the sense of strength, intelligence, etc. It makes perfect sense and I think it makes play dynamic at the metagame level. It reminds me of Alyria's Virtue die, Humanity in Sorcerer, and Good Stuff / Bad Stuff in Amber.

Resolution reads like an even interbreeding of Sorcerer and The Window, which is strange, but very interesting to read. I like the basic idea:  roll four dice, each corresponding to a given Planet, and rank them - it's the order that matters, not the values, both within characters' own set of attributes and across the various characters' results. The text includes extensive examples and I gather that once you get used to it, a huge amount of information is available once everyone's dice have hit the table. Not having played yet, I can't say how it flies.

I do have a few concerns for the authors about how the vision, the system, and the prose interact. I'm listing them for lots more feedback and contributions from others who've checked out the game.

1) The veto on the Storypath card seems paranoid to me. (This is common, representing, I think, hesitancy and fear regarding really letting "those players" have author power. The earliest version of The Pool struggled with the same issue; so does the Influence rules text in Fvlminata.)

2) The Panels/Pages rules are very nice conceptually, but their "in-game time" definition seems problematic - in comics, a single panel can encompass quite a lot of in-game time. I think the rules make more sense as metagame-level attention. (See McCloud's Understanding Comics for some of the difficulties in how imagined time-flow and panel construction [both among-panel and mis-en-scene] work together.)

3) The jargon is heavy going, especially since play itself seems fairly ram-bang easy. I think that the common game-designer urge to classify and add nuances to the classification set in a little too deeply. It might help to provide a summary of the system's interacting parts, which is not the same as a glossary. Here are some points where both text and design might stand some trimming.

- Character creation seems skewed, conceptually: there's no structure at all for a character's Planet composition ("whatever you want"), but then there's very organized, constrained structure after that regarding one's Traits. Why is it so open and then so closed?

- I don't see any need for anything but d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. All the strange dice (d7, d30) seem "twee" to me, weirdness for its own sake. They might be an appendix option, for instance.

- I think the difficulty levels should be stripped down to "simple" and "hard," or even to a single number, with the circumstance die being the only major "difficulty" element. Since the textual advice suggests doing this anyway, I suggest making that the rule and letting all that crunchy-refinement be abandoned.

7) The text distinguishes between Dynamic and Static Traits in some detail, but I can't see how this distinction operates in play. If it doesn't, then it ought to be eliminated.

Comments? Argument? Impressions? Let's talk it up.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Ron,

Fascinating.  I'll have to read through the whole thing carefully.  Looks fun.

One brief comment already, though:

Ron wrote:

- I don't see any need for anything but d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. All the strange dice (d7, d30) seem "twee" to me, weirdness for its own sake. They might be an appendix option, for instance.

I agree.  Setting aside the question of whether there is really a statistical reason for this (which is something I leave to the more mathematically-minded to figure out), note that on page 28 (bookmark: Rolling the Planets), there is a sidebar entitled "Where does he get all those wonderful dice?"  In this sidebar, the authors themselves point out that it took 3 years of searching to find a d34 or d16, and that even the authors haven't actually seen a d24!  If the game authors can't get the required equipment for the game, that seems a bit problematic.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Well, this is a cool-looking game.

The difficulty levels thing, to me, looks like an attempt to "concretize" the resolution system, which seems to be intentionally a source of information rather than the more conventional decisionmaking tool.

I find myself wondering about the mechanical function of Traits - is there one?  If not, then why do Diceless Characters have Traits?  If they're just descriptive devices, then do they need to be characters in their own right?

[bongert]

I agree.  Setting aside the question of whether there is really a statistical reason for this (which is something I leave to the more mathematically-minded to figure out), note that on page 28 (bookmark: Rolling the Planets), there is a sidebar entitled "Where does he get all those wonderful dice?"  In this sidebar, the authors themselves point out that it took 3 years of searching to find a d34 or d16, and that even the authors haven't actually seen a d24!  If the game authors can't get the required equipment for the game, that seems a bit problematic.

Well, the "twee" dice are all listed as optional. The standard set of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 are all the "recommended" set. And with several groups of superheroes under our belt, I can only think of a couple characters that were experiments with the wierd dice.

They're mostly there to bridge the gap between die sizes (d16 is a nice intermediary between d12 and d20, and d24 does similar things for d20 -> d30).

[bongert]

Well, this is a cool-looking game.

The difficulty levels thing, to me, looks like an attempt to "concretize" the resolution system, which seems to be intentionally a source of information rather than the more conventional decisionmaking tool.

They are, to some extent. They were mostly included (IIRC) before we had a decent way to compare rolls. I.e if both Renaissance Man and The Chameleon are trying to climb a wall, who would get there first? We used to have to roll both sets of planets under the same conditions (in this case Mars favored, Jupiter opposed), and then compare them. In later revisions (which haven't made it to the web site yet) I think we dealt with that more cleanly.

I find myself wondering about the mechanical function of Traits - is there one?  If not, then why do Diceless Characters have Traits?  If they're just descriptive devices, then do they need to be characters in their own right?

Well, the way the system is supposed to work is that Dice are a last resort. If a Trait applies to a situation, it happens. Only if no applicable traits are found do we resort to the dice. Diceless characters are only capable of what their Traits encompass. (well, that, and whatever a normal person would be capable of).

[woodelf]

First of all, a big thank-you to Ron. I asked him a couple of months ago to take a look at Four Colors al Fresco, and he graciously took the time to read what is a fairly large work.  And then went one better, and started a thread here.  Much more exposure, i'm sure, than had i started something--and he's got criticisms and questions, so it isn't just a content-free "look at our game!" post.

Next, a quick background on the rules he read: It's the same one that's on the website currently, which puts it a bit behind in revision.  But it's the most current one we have.  Lots of refinements and little details that we've figured out since that was put together, plus feedback from numerous convention games, aren't in there, so in a few cases we may already have an answer to a problem.  However, there are no massive changes in content--it's presentation that we're redoing from the ground up.  So feedback is plenty useful, and we're not asking for discussion of an entity that no longer exists.

I'd like to propose some discussion about one of the more ambitious games currently available. It's free, at Woodelf's website, The Impossible Dream. I'm putting this into RPG Theory rather than Indie Design, because I perceive the game as past the design stage - bit of a judgment call, but I also want to encourage "discuss this game" (any role-playing game) topics for this forum.

Four Colors al Fresco presents a freaky idea for a game premise: solid Avengers-style or X-Men-style superhero comics, set in Renaissance Italy. [snip] ... all fit just fine. I think. Or maybe it's a crazy idea and I'm just crazy too, I don't know.

It works even better when you see more character writeups.  Or, at least, it sure works for us.  We'll have to put a few more characters on the website. And it seems to work pretty well for others, when introduced through the medium of playing a game, rather than reading the rules.  Oh, for those of you taking a look, you might want to start with the quick-start rules to get an overview.

The game text and most of the design is aimed at Narrativism throughout. It's very strong and up-front about its goals, which are, "We are creating a comic book here." The uses of Titles, Panel structure, and more all reinforce it, which I think justifies inventing a whole new-system. It isn't simply a freaky setting, which could just as well be played using any existing supers game.

So I'm really interested in others' views about the extent of the explanatory text in Four Colors Al Fresco - its content, I think, is completely clear and consistent, so I'm curious about whether it works in terms of when it's applied and how much.

Yeah, what he said.  Any and all feedback is good--but especially teh sort that says "great idea...once i figured it out". Especially if you can follow it with why it was so hard to figure out.

I like the concept that planetary descriptors (attributes) are external to the characters: influences, not "qualities" in the sense of strength, intelligence, etc. It makes perfect sense and I think it makes play dynamic at the metagame level. It reminds me of Alyria's Virtue die, Humanity in Sorcerer, and Good Stuff / Bad Stuff in Amber.

Resolution reads like an even interbreeding of Sorcerer and The Window, which is strange, but very interesting to read. I like the basic idea:  roll four dice, each corresponding to a given Planet, and rank them - it's the order that matters, not the values, both within characters' own set of attributes and across the various characters' results. The text includes extensive examples and I gather that once you get used to it, a huge amount of information is available once everyone's dice have hit the table. Not having played yet, I can't say how it flies.

This is actually one of the bigger issues we're having in refining the game: keeping the Planets "external" in a meaningful way.  That is one of the core concepts behind the creation of this game, and we're a little concerned that it not end up just us saying they are "external", but, mechanically, they may as well be funny-name traits (like the Elements in Everway).

I do have a few concerns for the authors about how the vision, the system, and the prose interact. I'm listing them for lots more feedback and contributions from others who've checked out the game.

1) The veto on the Storypath card seems paranoid to me. (This is common, representing, I think, hesitancy and fear regarding really letting "those players" have author power. The earliest version of The Pool struggled with the same issue; so does the Influence rules text in Fvlminata.)

Point taken.  I suspect that wording is going to evaporate in the near future.  It still seems to be borderline-necessary for convention one-offs.  But it may not need to be an explicit rule--just something we do through metagame social pressure, should the need arise.  Hell, i've had a heck of a lot more "problems" with people using Descriptors than Storypath cards, anyway.

2) The Panels/Pages rules are very nice conceptually, but their "in-game time" definition seems problematic - in comics, a single panel can encompass quite a lot of in-game time. I think the rules make more sense as metagame-level attention. (See McCloud's Understanding Comics for some of the difficulties in how imagined time-flow and panel construction [both among-panel and mis-en-scene] work together.)

I'll see if i can find a copy.  I'm guessing you're meaning something special by "attention", but i don't recall that being a "defined term"--where should i look that up?

3) The jargon is heavy going, especially since play itself seems fairly ram-bang easy. I think that the common game-designer urge to classify and add nuances to the classification set in a little too deeply. It might help to provide a summary of the system's interacting parts, which is not the same as a glossary. Here are some points where both text and design might stand some trimming.

- Character creation seems skewed, conceptually: there's no structure at all for a character's Planet composition ("whatever you want"), but then there's very organized, constrained structure after that regarding one's Traits. Why is it so open and then so closed?

Because one flows from the other, so the Traits structure *does* constrain the Planets scores, effectively.  At least, that's the intent.  Also, there are two separate reasons behind it that don't necessarily agree with each other, and may lead to some dissonance in the text:

First, we wanted *some* structure.  ;-)  Seriously, part of it is to provide a framework for the gamer, since even complete novices to RPGs (i.e., no preconceptions) have found complete openness a bit daunting.  
Second, we wanted to throw game balance out the window.  That's why Planets are unconstrained.  And also why what exactly the scope of a Trait is is left undefined. We've created Superman-level characters with a handful of traits, Batman-level characters with about as many as you can have.  The difference being that the former has traits analogous to "Kryptonian" while the latter has Traits with a scope on the order of "Batarang".

- I don't see any need for anything but d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. All the strange dice (d7, d30) seem "twee" to me, weirdness for its own sake. They might be an appendix option, for instance.

That one is being fixed.  Whether it'll be shoved into an appendix, or sidebar, or still mentioned in the main text but more strongly delineated as optional is a presentation issue.  However, since i *do* want som mechanical soundness to the system, d16 will stay on the list.  Due to Button Men, they've become fairly easy to find once again, and they're easily-enough faked with a d20 (you just lose some elegence due to needing the occaisional reroll).

- I think the difficulty levels should be stripped down to "simple" and "hard," or even to a single number, with the circumstance die being the only major "difficulty" element. Since the textual advice suggests doing this anyway, I suggest making that the rule and letting all that crunchy-refinement be abandoned.

you've hit the crux of the matter, IMHO.  It goes beyond even the number of difficulty steps, or the distinction between "major" and "minor" circumstance dice: Do difficulty steps/modifiers make sense in a mechanic that is supposedly all about external situation, i.e., wouldn't "difficulty" be redundant?  

We may ditch Circumstance dice, the Omega die, difficulty levels, or all of the above.

Oh, while i'm thinking about it, our current attempt for opposed rolls is as follows:
--> Each side rolls their Planets
--> "multiply" the results--it's sort of like multiplying two matrices. But don't let that frighten you, it actually involves a simple comparison of the various placements, and there are only really 3 possibilities.  
--> Read the end result just like a regular Planets roll result.

This has the advantage of getting sensible results for any number of participants, with the single-participant roll just being a special case. Also, it reinforces the external nature of the Planets, at least to my eye. Also, we're currently working with the Omega die being "tied" to a Planet of your choice, rather than being set to a score of your choosing.  One, it fixes some probability wonkiness. Two, it makes it more useful--before, there wasn't really much point in using it, except in some fairly unusual circumstances. Three, it makes it less predictable in the fine details of what it does--that seems to me a better fit for the intended feel of supers whose powers stem froma fundamental imbalance in the universe.

7) The text distinguishes between Dynamic and Static Traits in some detail, but I can't see how this distinction operates in play. If it doesn't, then it ought to be eliminated.

I think that may be an artifact of my writing. Dynamic and Static are two of the Forces governed by the Planets, and i suspect i simply used them a lot in examples, because they tend to be a bit less esoteric than the other three (Known, Lost, Passion). It sounds to me like you're mistaking them for two categories, when, in reality, they aren't.  Also, it may be the fact that, by choice, Traits don't have an associated Planet or Force once they're in play.  The association of Traits with Planets is just for chargen--after that point, we strongly advise eliminating any reference to such, and just going with the Trait name and description. So, in a sense, we *have* eliminated the distinction, because it *doesn't* have an impact in play.  But, then again, you also theoretically can't tell the difference between a Dynamic Trait and a Passion Trait.

Hope that clears some things up, and/or provides fodder for more discussion.  Great to have somebody tearing our game apart!

[woodelf]

They're mostly there to bridge the gap between die sizes (d16 is a nice intermediary between d12 and d20, and d24 does similar things for d20 -> d30).

Nitpick: the d24 does no such thing.  The step between d20 and d30 is already the perfect size.  The d34 is even more useless.  Except for the d16 and d30, and perhaps the d3, the odds actually work out best without any of the "funky" dice.  I'll cop to the extra dice being at my insistence, and a bad case of gamer-geek-ness.  In the next revision, the "official" dice will be d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d16, d20, and maybe d30.  Others will likely be mentioned, but perhaps less formally, and/or hidden away in a sidebar/appendix.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

You're welcome! I'm glad you're happy with me posting it here. The game's (a) complex/unusual enough at first glance and (b) baked enough for it to get a real Theory workout, I figured, not to mention the promotion.

A few thoughts, nothing too organized ...

1) I love the Circumstance die. I think it's awesome. I suggest sticking with the basic four-die roll plus the Circumstance, and junking the rest of the "Difficulty" stuff. You'll get all the circumstantial modifiers you need from the die.

2) By "attention," I mean literally that - no jargon. Hence a panel shift means an attention-shift on our, the people's part, as we play. It doesn't matter squat how much time is involved; that's just a retroactive function of whatever happened in the panel. So you still get sequence of play (in pages/panels) and in-game time (as an understood, retroactive effect), without having to link the two in literal/causal terms.

3) This may sound weird for someone who kept harping on eliminating wordbrush, but your point about the Planets and Traits is probably worth stating in the text, especially the Superman-Batman contrast. You know that's the Debate Duo that always gets brought up for a new supers game.

4) I suggest that the Force (Dynamic, etc) labels never be applied to Traits under any circumstances. It's really confusing.

Best,
Ron

[woodelf]

Ok, i've put a bunch of characters online.  You can get at them from <http://woodelf.dyndns.org/alfresco/chars.html> (or follow the links to get there, but you know the drill). The PDFs aren't perfect--i noticed a few issues with their rendering, but they're readable, and make the point.  I'll get around to fixing them at some pont in the not-too-distant future.  

Particularly good ones: The Spook, Gibraltar, Arbor of the Orient, all of the Daring daVincis, Perspex, The Incredible Jumping Frog.

Also, note the way power level is handled--the kids from Prof Omega's school are some of the lowest-powered chars we've created.  The Spook is also fairly low-powered--much more "pulpy". Golem and th main crew of the Santa Francisca are some of the most powerful chars.  The others fall in between.  Also, note how the system deals very well with disparate power levels (the bane of supers RPGs).  Tales of Justice features a spectrum of power, from around the level of The Shadow (The Spook, Marathon)  through middle-tier heroes akin Wonder Woman (Renaissance Man)  to perhaps on a par with The Hulk (Golem). The only time we've had any play balance problems was once, with Tabula Rasa, and i think that was more an artifact of a convention game than anything else: It was the first time he'd been played at a convention, so we hadn't realized that our power description is poor--the player was playing him like plastic man, when he's intended to be much more limited--and the player had not gotten into the swing of things until near the end of the session, so i let her go with it a bit. In hindsight, it perfectly illustrated one of the features of the system (if it's not on the charsheet, it's not fixed--meaning a character's absolute power level might very well change from session to session, especially if played by different people or with a different SG), but not in a way that's good for a con game.  And, even then, she didn't overshadow the other players significantly, despite suddenly having Phenomenal Cosmic Powers(tm).

One last note, for the bandwidth-limited: the kids from Prof omega's school are much smaller files, for unknown reasons. They, alone, give you a narrower view of what the system looks like in practice, but i'll fix the PDFs of the other chars in a few days.

[woodelf]

Ok, it's been two weeks, so you've all had time to read it.  So, any further comments?  Specific things people want to discuss? Things you want explicated?  Come on, tell me something.  ;-)

[clehrich]

Hang in there, woodelf.  I just started my semester and I'm pretty swamped.  What fun stuff I am doing is largely my own (and of course following Forge threads).

[woodelf]

- I think the difficulty levels should be stripped down to "simple" and "hard," or even to a single number, with the circumstance die being the only major "difficulty" element. Since the textual advice suggests doing this anyway, I suggest making that the rule and letting all that crunchy-refinement be abandoned.

you've hit the crux of the matter, IMHO. It goes beyond even the number of difficulty steps, or the distinction between "major" and "minor" circumstance dice: Do difficulty steps/modifiers make sense in a mechanic that is supposedly all about external situation, i.e., wouldn't "difficulty" be redundant?

1) I love the Circumstance die. I think it's awesome. I suggest sticking with the basic four-die roll plus the Circumstance, and junking the rest of the "Difficulty" stuff. You'll get all the circumstantial modifiers you need from the die.

Here's where my thought process goes:
In a "normal" RPG, die rolls are based principly on factors internal to the character, and modifiers come from external circumstances.  So, how likely you are to clear a chasm is a factor of your Athletics skill, but the GM may apply a penalty for a particularly wide chasm.

In Four Colors al Fresco, the inital goal was to reverse this: the fundamental variable is external.  So, does that mean that there need to be internally-derived modifiers, the inverse of the "wide chasm" above?  If so, what form do these take? Remember, we're talking a game where we wouldn't be making the roll if the character description could tell us if the character can succeed, so it seems hypocritical to then look at some aspect of the character when making a roll.  But if we have external modifiers (as the Circumstance die currently stands), isn't that redundant, because the whole roll is external-based?  That pretty much sums up my confusion over the matter.

Now, we have some tentative stabs at explanations/solutions:
(1) The Omega die.  it's as close to internal as any of the numbers on the character sheet get, and it's under the player's control (sort of), which mirrors the GM-set modifiers in "normal" games.
(2) Circumstance dice.  Just because we're shifting the burden of fundamental randomization from character to environment doesn't mean that modifiers were ever actually tied to one or the other, or, if they were, that they have to be moved in response.  After all, a + on one side of the equation is equivalent to a - on the other, mechanically.
(3) There shouldn't be modifiers.  The whole point is that rolling the Planets is out of the characters' and players' control, and reflects the fundamental whims of the universe.  The fact that, when resorted to, the dice produce the same results (statistically speaking) regardless of "difficulty" is part of what gives the mechanic a different, "external" feel. (4) With any of the above, but especially with #3, it is important to lean on the weight of evidence when determining results via the Descriptors (narrative traits), and really keep the dice as a last result--only resort to them when you really can't decide, which should be when it's a fairly "even" situation, in terms of character traits.  If it's more likely than not (or the inverse), go with that. The dice aren't intended to add randomness when someone has about 2/3rds odds--they're intended to figure out which way the probabilyt collapses when it's teetering on that 50/50 edge.

[zaal]

Ok, it's been two weeks, so you've all had time to read it.  So, any further comments?  Specific things people want to discuss? Things you want explicated?  Come on, tell me something.  ;-)

Hi woodelf,

This game looks really cool!  I think Ron has already addressed the heavier issues, so I'll just give some of my observations.

The whole idea of a dice roll not reflecting a character's internal capabilities is kind of neat  :)  .  While it may have been used in other games before, this is my first experience with it.

Is there anything like "starting number" of dice for your dice?  I didn't see any if there was.

I'm really amazed at how much terminology can affect one's experience of a game.  For example, instead of turns or rounds we have panels - That slight change in terminology just makes the whole thing scream "You are playing a comic!"  

Jon