Star Wars meandering

[Mike Holmes]

That seems like it could turn into a 'Player A versus Player B' OR a 'Party cohesion above all logic and reason' (or, ironically, both at once) real easy. Which would be Bad.

Yeah, I thought about that, too. Hard to fix, too. If you give players an incentive either way, then you just make things worse. You coud give a metagame reward of some sort at the end of each session to players who's answers matched the other players, but this could again lead to collusion, easily. Hmmm...

Mike

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I'd be seriously tempted to use a Jenga stack for each character, if it weren't for the logistical awkwardness of preserving the stacks between sessions. For each unit of Dark Side assistance you accept, you have to move one block. It's reliably safe at the start (unless you really screw up), and gets insanely tense and dangerous after a certain point.

The only possible way for this Jenga thing to work that I can see is for the entire story to play out in a single session. That way you don't have to worry about storing the stacks until the next time.

I point this out because it struck me as an assumption that you would want to have continuing characters and thus need to store the stacks. Just my two cents.

[Mike Holmes]

Not really so difficult to do the Jenga thing. At the end of a session record the number of blocks pulled (a tally can be kept as you go). When you do a new session, just build the tower like starting from scratch. Then when the next infraction occurs, pull out all the ones from the last game, plus the one for this infraction. This makes that first pull more risky, but that's probably not a big deal.

If that seems to be too long or weird, then the player can pull all the ones that he did before at the start of play and as it goes on. If the tower collapses, then he can just start over until he get's it right.

Still, if unknown odds is what you want, there are easier ways. In fact any sufficiently complicated die rolling mechanic should suffice. Just as with Jenga, the player will have some idea the danger, but not exact. If you want really unknown odds, you can use some blind method of dertermining odds. Player rolls a d6 for each level of infraction, and the GM consults some chart that has the deductions from the total assigned randomly.

roll
1___ -4
2___ -2
3___ -5
4___ -6
5___ -1
6___ -3

I'm sure there are even easier ways that I'm not thinking of.

Mike

[clehrich]

I quite like the idea of having some power you can use, but you have to roll to avoid its affecting what Side you are on.  It seems to me that every point of Dark Side you acquire, you should have LOTS of cool powers you can start acquiring (but you have to roll again when you use them, of course), and that returning to the Light Side would take similar rolls but at minuses for each Dark point you've acquired.  Remember, the players know perfectly well that the Dark Side is dangerous and evil --- they've seen movies.  But if you keep putting them in difficult situations, the question is whether they'll start going for an immediate solution (impatient you are!), or just trusting in the Force that everything will turn out okay in the end.  Since the whole mechanic deals with an explicit problematic, for both players and characters, I don't see the difficulty in having it be very simplistic.  The complexity comes when the character is faced with disaster in terms of events, but which could be averted by the use of the Dark Side; the character now agonizes about what to do, which is presumably the goal of the mechanic.

[Jeph]

Okay, pimp mode. :D I've just completed a ~16-page Feng Shui --> Starwars conversion, and am writing up the playtest adventure. It includes new and adapted archetypes (Jedi Pilot, Ace Pilot, Jedi Warrior, Jedi Philosopher, Fringer, Noble, Droid, a few others), a new skill list, Force and Flow schticks, vehicle combat rules, and vehicle and character record sheets. End game pimp.

The way I did Dark Side, was a two stats (Light and Dark), the sum of which was equal to double the character's Force attribute (which replaced Chi). Dark Side assists in the Force Lightning schtick, and can be used for better results with your Destiny (replacing Fortune) dice, but if too much is aquired (i.e., more Dark then Light), the character becomes an NPC. However, I'm looking for alternatives. This thread is . . . useful . . . to me. :D

Others before us have done SW stuff with FS. Check out this site, as well as this one. I don't really like what they've done, but it's inspirational material. :-)

[Drew Stevens]

Hi, I'm DS! :)  I'd wondered if you were the same Jeff/Jeph fellow.

But anywho.  Yeah, you already sent me the 16 page PDF.  Which has mostly been burning in the inspiration fires of my belly- the result is a MASSIVELY expanded list of Flow Schticks for Cool Lightsaber Tricks.  And had me thinking about the whole Light Side / Dark Side disjunct- which is how I got to here.

I dunno.  I just don't see going to the Dark Side as a single, smooth and complete thing, even within Star Wars.  It shouldn't be that clear, IMO.

[Jeph]

Yeah, it's me. I migrated hear thanks to a link in one of Andrew Martin's posts on RPG.net. :-)

Anyway. Perhaps call for Willpower rolls with the character's current Dark Side as the TN, at certain times? If they fail, then the GM gets to narrate their character's actions for a spell. That can help introduce new conflicts, and give characters a good reason not to let their Dark Side rating get out of hand.

Maybe characters could, whenever they like, gain extra Destiny dice. When they roll the die, they add the result to a running talley on their character sheet. At the end of the session, they make a Willpower roll, against that talley. If they fail, they gain the Outcome in Dark Side. If they succeed, then the Outcome is subtracted from the current talley. The talley does not reset at the beginning of each session. At high tension moments, characters would have to make a Willpower roll against their Dark Side; failure indicating that the GM, or maybe the players communually, determine the characters actions. Kinda like Lapses in Unsung?

[Drew Stevens]

Mm.  Not being familiar with Unsung, I can't really comment.

As to the rest, I dunno.  The idea of the Dark Side not being an utterly binary state has somewhat enchanted me.  And removing narrative control from the player over how their character acts seems... not so good, to me.

I suppose I should actually just finish writing up my version... ;)

[M. J. Young]

Mike's mention of the secret ballots got me thinking this direction; it might help.

Whenever the player chooses to accept help from the dark side, the amount of help he takes is connected to a die type. That is, a really major boost would connect to a d12, and a simple push to a d4. The player would know what die he's taking, but he wouldn't know what was rolled. These rolls would be tallied by the referee, and kept secret.

Also, a roll would be made for each character that would be his personal break point.  I suspect something like 5d20 would do the job well, as most people would find a break point in the middle somewhere, but the range is pretty wide. This would also be hidden from the player.

Redemptive acts might also be included, and these, too, would be connected to a hidden die, reducing dark side points by an unknown amount.

Now what you have is that the player doesn't know how many dark side points he actually has or how many he can absorb before he goes over the edge. He only knows that he's taking a significant risk which grows greater with each use of the dark side.

Keeping all the information secret from him tempts him to believe that he's not so bad off as all that and can afford to take the chance--at least for the risk-accepting player. The risk-adverse player will probably avoid the dark side even when he's got plenty of room to play it.

Well, it might work.

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Maybe I'm just a Fortune-y Narrativist kind of guy, but ...

1. Sorcerer's Humanity rules are Fortune-driven. Do a Good Thing, get a Humanity gain roll; do a Bad Thing or a Sorcery Thing and get a Humanity check. Neither is guaranteed. We've recently discussed the thematic content of this rules-device on the Adept Press forum. Please note that the roll for Humanity checks for Doing Bad Things is always 50%, regardless of current Humanity score.

Hence, there you are, at Humanity 1 ... do the thing? The Bad Thing? Will it take you to 0? 50%, pal - same as the drop from (e.g.) 6 to 5.

2. I'm reading a hell of a lot of Tunnels & Trolls stuff lately (and hoo-boy is that gonna be a series of posts one day), and here's a scene from one of their solo modules. You meet this smirking elf, right, and he offers a game (you can refuse). Pay 100 g.p. to play. Reach into a bag full of jewels and cobras, and take a jewel. Roll 1d6. Repeat as many times as you like; stop when you like. Keep adding the die total to the last roll/total. When that value hits 20, a snake strikes you, very awfully poisonously.

If I were setting up a Dark Side kinda situation, these two examples would be playing the primary prompting role.

Best,
Ron

[Walt Freitag]

Um, Walt, good points, in general. But the bag thing? Same odds as the d20 idea. The solution is to use more tolkens (or a larger die) and have them reduce more slowly).

Buzz.

The d20 idea: chance of survival after n <= 20 points used is 19/20 * 18/20 * 17/20 * ... * (20-n)/20

The bag thing: chance of survival after n <= 20 draws is 19/20 * 18/19 * 17/18 * ... * (20-n)/(21-n) which cancels down to (20-n)/20.

Odds could be made the same by adding a black token to the bag every time a safe white token is drawn. Of course, using more tokens would, as you say, improve the odds, but only in proportion to the total number used -- that is to say, regardless of how many safe tokens you put in the bag, by the time the bag is half full, your odds of survival thus far are about 50% (exactly so, if the number of white tokens is an odd number). Using a bigger die actually makes things worse, in proportion. For example, if you were using a 40-point scale and a 40-sided die, by the time you were down to half (with 20 points left), your odds of survival would be less than 0.153% (.00153).

- Walt

[John Kim]

I have to say that I think that the idea of the GM offering bits of bait to the players sounds like just too much fun.
...
But I also think that there has to be some arbitrary game mechanic that serves to throw the player over to the dark side at some point. The GM cannot just decide.

OK, maybe this is going off topic, but personally I feel quite differently about this.  I think the main thing is that I prefer that morality remain ambiguous -- i.e. a quality which may be judged by differently by various characters as well as players.  

By far my favorite Call of Cthulhu game was one where we threw out the Sanity mechanics, and instead everyone simply role-played their character's breakdowns in response to the mind-bending horrors which we encountered.  (This was Chris Lehrich's Ripper campaign, which is now being used for his game design "Shadows in the Fog".)  One of the things I especially liked about it was the ambiguity of my original character, Inspector Grimmond.  He became increasingly violent and paranoid in response to what he saw -- but I still think that this was in many ways more rational than some of the other PCs responses which were on the surface more "normal".  

For a Star-Wars-like game, I think I might have a very small number of Force points or levels -- and each one is associated with the particular test, source, or event by which the character got it.  A PC could accept Force points gained in training from a particular master, but whether they are "Dark" or "Light" depends on the teachings of the master.  Similarly, there might be a moral test to gain a new Force point, and the PC gets the level regardless but what he does colors the nature of the point.  

In keeping with my preferences, I would never take the PC away from the player -- but there might be a point when a player could realize that much of his vaunted power in the Force is actually Dark, and that those points will not work for non-Dark ends.

[Jeremy Cole]

It seems to me, in line with the films, any mechanic that maps a character's decline should come from his motivations, if he chooses his primal or base instincts.  Further, a mechanic to map a character's decline should also be able to map any possible redemption, and I don't think this should involve the player ever losing absolute control of his character.


Motivation
I think the important thing about any fall to the darkside is its motivation, needing to come from a character's choice towards greed, envy, rage or whatever.  I would suggest players may accept dark side force bonuses (extra dice, or rerolls or something) for any sequence of actions, if they can attach a strong primal drive to the act, such as rage against Vader.  This bonus should be large or small, depending on how strongly the character feels about this act.  I think taking the bonus should also require the character to act primitively, or barbaric, for the duration of the bonus, hacking apart the guild droids without any regard for civilians around them, or whatever.


Decline
I'd go with the points model of the dark side, represented on a scale of 20 (none) to 1 (complete), where you lose 1 point for accepting the above bonus.  If the player doesn't take the bonus, I'd require him to test against his dark side level, rolling a number of d20 according to how tempting the dark side is for this course of action.  If one of the d20 is over the player's level, the character should be required to act according to the dark side anyway, but without receiving the bonus.  I think this should be left to the player to narrate, however.


Redemption
The player would, however, receive a light side point each time they are forced to act 'evil', when they didn't take the dark side bonus originally.  However, not accepting the bonus of the dark side when the player would be forced to act in such a way anyway would be dangerous, and take some bravery from the player.


The thing would be that players wouldn't fail once and remain evil, a player who had given in to his urges many times, like Vader, would constistantly act 'evil', even when the player desired otherwise, but there would always be chance of a redeeming act.  It can be thought of as the scenes in RotJ with Luke, Vader and the Emperor as Vader failing a series of dark side checks, acting without the power of the dark side, but building enough power that he eventually makes a check, and saves Luke.

[Drew Stevens]

A few posits

First, there wouldn't be an absolute 'Dark Side' with the GM temptation thing.  Just increasing levels of metaphysical debt/requirements owed to the Dark Side.

I actually think that it's the 'Whoops!  You're character's just become an NPC!' mechanic that underlies any Fortune Dark Side system that drives me up the wall.  It should never happen arbitrarily or as a fluke- which is the potential for every other system given.  Under mine, the player would never suddenly lose control of their character- that control would be shaved away, sliver by sliver, until the player decides they have become too corrupted to continue trying.  At which point they voluntarily give the character up.  It becomes a matter of player choice at every step along the path, rather than a fortune mechanic dictating.  And while I realize that dice are really easy to ignore, it also removes the drama from the situation to do so, in the exact same fashion as too overtly ignoring combat results that would be fatal to the PCs removes the tension from a fight.

A compromise might be the Raveloft Dark Powers check- but that seems to weaken the narrativist potential of the whole drama by taking what should be a choice and making it a die roll to see if the character is strong enough to resist.  Which makes perfect sense from a simulationist sense ('The character's rise or fall has nothing to do with my knowledge and abilities as a player, but rather their own as a character') but seems lousy from a narrativist PoV.

Although I do like *ip's system- that seems to be on the same goal as not instantly reducing a character to Dark Side NPC status.  At the same time, I don't know about that 'Every time you perform evil while resisting, you get a light side point back'... while it makes sense mechanically, it doesn't really seem to fit genre...

[Mike Holmes]

OK, maybe this is going off topic, but personally I feel quite differently about this.  I think the main thing is that I prefer that morality remain ambiguous -- i.e. a quality which may be judged by differently by various characters as well as players.  

These are good points, John. But your point is just to keep this portion Freeform. The decision to go Freeform on any particular point is one distinct from the discussion here. That is, for any particular group, a mechanical solution is better, and for another a freeform solution is better. As such, neither can be superior to the other a priori, I believe.

My point is that the freeform mechanic that involves the GM arbitrarily deciding seems problematic. In that I think we agree. The two solutions are to make it a freeform player decision as you point out, or to go mechanical instead as I suggest.

Mike