Any suggestions on genre support mechanics?

[Cameron]

I did another playtest of my still unnamed crime genre game. One of the things that struck me was how action-oriented the players were. That is to say, they were more interested in describing their characters' actions than speaking as their characters.  

I realize that this is a matter of personal style and it certainly didn't get in the way of the game, but periods of "downtime" like travelling in a car from one scene to the next would be a great opportunity for in-character dialog like in, say, Pulp Fiction. The game runs smoothly without any degree of witty, in character banter, and I understand that many players would interject such banter without any prompting.

My question is this: can anyone think of a way to make the mechanics support the "witty banter between hardened criminals" tradition without being too overpowering? The only reason it even occurs to me that such a thing would make sense is the way Dying Earth was laid out with Tag Lines.



_________________
-Cameron
genexcuse@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/genexcuse
http://www.msamericastrash.com
http://www.generationexcuse.com

[ This Message was edited by: Cameron on 2001-08-21 16:38 ]

[Ron Edwards]

Sorcerer's bonus method isn't too bad. It lets the player choose between describing the action and making a quip (or hell, both too).

But if I'm not mistaken, you're also, or even mainly, thinking about plain old dialogue without rolling. The tag-line method is certainly the latest notable try at rewarding this behavior. I'm sure there are some others. We can go all the way back to Toon and get Story Points for good lines ...

One idea is kind of like Toon: a "storable" bonus - if two PCs have a good exchange, then they each get a metagame bonus for later. I also like this because (1) it's about dialogue, not just one-liners, and (2) it can arise from conflict as well as friendly chats.

Also, see the last paragraph or two in my Dead Meat review about "links," which is a bonus concept that Dav, Mario, Elizabeth, and I came up with after playing the game.

Arbitrating it, I suppose, is a GM thing (as in The Dying Earth), but I'm not sure whether this is a problem; the buck has to stop somewhere after all.

Best,
Ron

[Time]

My thought would be that perhaps you can give a "bonus dice" dynamic similar to Sorcerer (good roleplaying = extra dice).

If you want to encurage witty banter it might work to reward such action.  Some folks need an in game reason to do just about anything, while others jump at the chance and don't need an "excuse."  An in game bonus relating to that action will help get everyone in the right mood.

It could work something like this:

if the players engage in witty banter that is connected to their current situation, you could grant a bonus.  That's easy to do, and the bonus shouldn't be too high as it is simple.

However, if they engage in banter that isn't connected, but they are able to make a connection to that banter later in the game, they get a bigger bonus for helping add drama/interest.

An example would be the scene in Pulp Fiction where the two hit men (I forget their names at the moment) are driving in a car and talking about hamburger joints in other countries ("Do you know what they call a Big Mac in France?").  Not connected directly to the hit they are about to perform, yet interesting conversation.  Then - once they get to the appartment they bring it up again when talking about the Big Kahuna Burger and asking one of the poor saps they are going to kill if he "Knows what they call a Big Mac in France?"

Sure, it's not really necessary to the plot/storyline, but it adds flavor and drama to the scene.  This would then be worth a much larger bonus.

Just an idea.

-Time

[Paul Czege]

Hey Cameron, Ron,

Arbitrating it, I suppose, is a GM thing...

One of the things I'm noticing recently about GMing is that I don't like having too much responsibility for arbitrating, determining target numbers, determining the size of opposed die pools, etc. I'm sure it's one of the reasons I'm excited about my forthcoming scenario for The Pool. I'm enthused about being able to focus more of my attention on developing and driving opportunities for the players to expose protagonism.

But the realization has also caused me to push my thinking about how conflict resolution modifiers can be self-policing, or driven by player choices, rather than GM judgement calls. So how about this:

Protagonism in a crime story based game would benefit from Pulp Fiction-esque narrative. How about letting the player gamble on it. A player can make a statement during interlude scenes, and gamble, agreeing in advance of the statement to take a negative modifier to actions in a subsequent scene if the gamble doesn't pay off. The gamble is that they can provoke a discussion with another player character about one of their own personal descriptors. If they provoke the discussion, they get a bonus in the next action sequence.

Totally self-policing :smile:

Whaddya think?

Paul

[Cameron]

Paul, I like that idea a great deal.

To further narrow the focus of this discussion:
I'm not really too concerned with banter in an action scene, since there is more than enough going on to entertain everyone at the table, I was thinking more for the low points. In the playtest, the characters were supposed to make a pick-up at an airport (a la Get Shorty). It was impossible to make the picking up of a key and going to the airport lockers rivetting, even if there was the danger of getting caught.

In a similar vein, driving back from the airport was a slow bit, but I didn't immediately want to just cut to the scene. A "break" in the action where players gamble amongst themselves through exchange of dialog for a bonus to the next scene sounds very much in line with what I had in mind.

Maybe there is a finite amount of "bonus" in the game and players may jockey for a piece of it from each other. If an NPC gets into a discussion, than the bonus could transfer over to the GM as well.

I like where this is going.

[jdrakeh]

Many moons ago in my first full-fledged AD&D campign, we actually had a rule for witty in-character banter:

If you say something so witty in character that the game momentarily comes to a stop for everybody to appreciate it out of character, then you've earned some extra experience.

Admittedly, that's pretty vague - basically, how it worked was that a witty comment earned you 200 or so extra experience points.

Note that it is a *lot* harder than you'd think to say something that is appropriately witty to a given situation.

James Hargrove

[Cadriel]

I'm new here (I post on RPGnet under Wayne S. Rossi from time to time, if anybody would recognize me), but this just seemed appropriate.  In games I've run recently, I've simply added in the arbitrary metagame mechanic of style points.  In Changeling, this was roughly equal to 1/5 of one experience point (5 style points = 1 experience point).  The idea was that I could recognize cool ideas, appropriate bits of dialogue, and the like.  (I even used it a time or two for great rolls made while just tossing dice, just because it was an entirely arbitrary measure.)  In a crime game, a more heavily codified version (i.e., not entirely based on the GM's whim) of the style point sounds like it could do a lot to enhance the type of play you're going for.  Or not.

-Wayne

[Paul Czege]

Hey Cameron,

Maybe there is a finite amount of "bonus" in the game and players may jockey for a piece of it from each other.

I think what I'd be shooting for is players "pumping" themselves up for the action sequences by provoking banter about their own quirks. If it was a competition for a limited pool of bonus, you might get players playing artificially silent and nonresponsive in an effort to protect bonus they've managed to earn. Perhaps you could limit it in another way. Make use of Ron's concept of "Links" and rule that a player can only earn the bonus from provoking their Link. The bonus becomes gone after the first subsequent action sequence, and a player can only stockpile two bonuses.

I'd probably playtest without limiting it to the character's Link, and see how it goes.

Paul

[FilthySuperman]

The idea about using "style points" (sorry don't have the poster's name handy right this second) seemed to have alot of merit. Perhaps you could modify this to suit your setting, and instead of using it as an experience generator you could give it a more "in game - physical usage". It's been my experience that those characters who prefer to stick to action as opposed to dialogue tend to be motivated by
A) things that raise thier character in power
B) Items, weapons, and equipment

Perhaps you could find some plausible way to weave money in with roleplaying. I'm not sure how it could be done to make "good sense" right this second, but I'll think on it.

something to the effect of
Dialogue and banter merits points
those points are stored for later "purchases"

I could give examples, but they'd all be bad. :razz:

T

[Cameron]

Okay, how does this sound?

At the beginning of each game session, players are randomly assigned conversation topics ("I'll give you a topic; the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman. Discuss." These topics would actually be very broad and vague. For example: Food, Recent Travel, Old Movies, etc.

When the character fits the conversation topic into he game, they receive an immediate reward that lasts for the duration of the session.

Here's what I was thinking. First off, my game uses a poker deck instead of dice. When determining a random topic of conversation, there are then 54 possible topics (which are vague enough that they can hopefully be reused).

There is already a mechanic that allows players to redraw bad cards (based on the experience of the character), but the points generated by the conversation system will work a little differently. The player may redraw only his BEST card. Meaning that it helps you very little if you already had a pretty good hand, but could save your ass if you drew a stinker. That's enough of an incentive to make people use the conversation system, but doesn't punish players who can't get the hang of it. Another variation on this idea is that the conversation points generated are only applicable to the NEXt session, rather than the one you are in.

Any thoughts?

[Zak Arntson]

On 2001-08-22 17:59, Cameron wrote:
At the beginning of each game session, players are randomly assigned conversation topics ("I'll give you a topic; the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman. Discuss." These topics would actually be very broad and vague. For example: Food, Recent Travel, Old Movies, etc.

Any thoughts?

I like this, but I'd be wary of forcing a topic.  Going back to our Dying Earth game, I felt that my taglines never had a good chance to show themselves.  But I felt all of us came up with some amazing quotables.  If I played Dying Earth again, I'd try and insert a sort of "exchange tagline for improv quote at any time" rule.

Though, since you'd be doing this banter during in-game downtime, I can imagine it would be easier to just bust into your conversation topic.

Maybe you deal out 3 "topic" cards.  During downtime, a person can pitch in a topic card and use it, or gamble their own topic by sacrificing one of their topic cards.

This then turns into a token = any topic mechanic.  But if the pregenerated topics were broad enough, players with trouble improving could go to their drawn topics, and players with a good idea could just go buck.

[Jeffrey Straszheim]

To save me from having to buy the game just to find out . . .

Could someone summarize what Dying Earth's tag line mechanic
as, and how it works. (Or maybe a link to a review that discusses it.)

Thanks :smile:

[Cameron]

On 2001-08-22 22:02, stimuli wrote:
To save me from having to buy the game just to find out . . .

Could someone summarize what Dying Earth's tag line mechanic
as, and how it works. (Or maybe a link to a review that discusses it.)

Thanks :smile:

Basically, every player is given three Jack Vance-ish statements. If they can have their character say them and have it make sense in the context of the scene, they are rewarded with experience points.

-Cameron

[FilthySuperman]

Speaking about the "giving players a topic" this sounds like some distant cousin of "railroading" to me.
If you found some way In character to approach my character and attempt to draw him/her into that conversation, it'd be different.

T

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I agree with the Superfilth, and it's based on a pretty big issue: Premise.

One thing that seems to get missed by a lot of people is that the little conversations in Pulp Fiction are not fluff. They all deal with the central ethical issue of the movie: "how much of yourself will you lose in the name of loyalty?" Yes, even the foot massage conversation, and MOST especially the chat about eating pork.

So the conversations bear directly on the ACTIONS which are to follow. If you lay out the events of the movie in chronological order, the connection is very direct.

But this isn't a Pulp Fiction discussion - it's about role-playing. And if the goal is to get dialogue INTO play, then it has to matter. So far we've dealt with reward systems as the main mechanism, and I agree with that. Now we have to talk about reward systems for WHAT.

I suggest that it be retroactive - when the players/GM can say, "Hey, that action relates right back to the discussion we had on the way!" or something similar, then whatever reward you've hit upon goes into play. It could be that the action gets a bonus, or that the reward-point-pool goes up, or whatever.

Now, how this plays out is a question - will players and GM be able to do it? Will it "work"? The answer is, I don't know yet.

But whatever solution is involved, we are talking about RELEVANT dialogue, not pop fluff. The burger example is OK stylistically, because it gets revisited as a topic, but the pork example is WAY better, because it directly bears on the most significant ethical act of the story (Jules' leaving Marcellus' service).

Best,
Ron