Storypunk: The Universalis Mod Version

[Jonathan Walton]

I was working on getting Storypunk ready for the playtest I'm running in two weeks (at a local Con), when I decided I need some kind of currency for handling player interaction.  Then I decided that I wanted players to regain currency by causing conflicts among themselves.  Then I realized that I was rewriting Universalis.

So, here's my thoughts on Storypunk as a "Universalis + immersion" Mod.  Depending on how much time I have during the next couple weeks, I might even use Universalis as the basis for my playtest system, though I eventually plan to develop my own rules and move away from Ralph and Mike's game.

Here goes:

Character Creation

You are... you.  The characters in Storypunk start out as merely being avatars of the players.  My character starts out being a bloke named Jonathan Walton, a Junior EAS Major at Oberlin College, etc.  However, this avatar distinction is important, because it's essential to the immersion of Storypunk (as opposed to the "everyone's-a-GM" play style of Universalis).

Characters are quantified in two distinct ways, by the Duties they have as part of the Troupe, and by the Themes they're trying to express with their own performances.

The Troupe

Together, all the character make up a Troupe of Troubadors.  A Troupe combines elements of the traditional party system with aspects of family and a buisness arrangement.  You don't necessarily have to like all the other members of your Troupe.  Imagine "The Real World," except without the pretentiousness.  Wait, nevermind.  The pretentiousness is there too...

In any case, the Troupe has banded together because it's the only way you all can get what you want: to travel through the infinite streams of Story, becoming personally involved in 1001 tales, each more fabulous than the last.  Like Roger Daltrey sings, you are "trying to find the answer to 50 million fables."

Duties

Within the Troupe, each character has a specific role to fill.  After all, when the Troupe commandeers a story, it takes a great deal of work to keep the story from collapsing completely, since hacking into it causes severe damage to the story itself.  There are many different kinds of Duties that characters could take on themselves, but they can be divided to several general categories:

-- Administrator (Admin): This kind of Duty is mostly meta-story (though not meta-game, since it happens in-character) and involves organizing the Troubadors in order to make things work, facilitating discussions, resolving disputes, and the like.  Some Troupes have a Player King who handles all administrative functions (like an IC GM), but often these are split up into seperate responsibilties that various members share.

-- Genius Loci (Loki): A Loki takes on responsibilities relating to setting, place, environment, and the like.  While other Troubadors might be actors in the story, Lokis take over components of the story world itself, becomine castle walls, storms, gentle spring rain, and mountain ranges.  Again, this can be a unified position, or one split into components.

-- Protagonist (Protag): Protags are the prima donnas of the Storypunk work, always used to having all the attention focused on themselves.  While there are professional Protags, most Troupes have a rotating position that changes with each tale they hack into.  After all, the limelight can be blinding.

-- Supporting Role (Oscar): Oscars are the bread & butter of stories, lesser characters that support the Protag in one way or another, even by killing the role they've assumed.  In more non-traditional stories, there might not even be a Protag, just a bunch of Oscars that take turns having a brief stint in the sun.  Usually, every member of a Troupe has to pull Oscar Duty at some point, but most specilize in particular types, such as princesses, tragic companions, or little green men from Mars.

-- Nemesis: Nemeses are often more egocentric that professional Protags, but it's often part of their job description to cackle madly and make claims of world domination.  In all honesty, a Nemesis is just a particularly nasty sort of Protag who makes no effort to be heroic or shine in the spotlight.  Some Troupes have individuals who specialize in villainy, but just as often the Duty rotates through those who are willing to shoulder it.

-- Master of Disposable Goons (Ninja): Anytime a Troupe needs someone to represent a faceless mass of people, be it a mob, or a goblin horde, or a ninja clan, or an opposing army, or a room full of dancers, or anything else... they call on the resident Ninja.  Often this Duty is given to a single individual, but it can be divided, especially in Troupes where mass combat or complex social intrigue is the norm.

-- Tracker/Ender: These two are really just specialized Admins.  A Tracker is the one who paves the way to the next story the group assumes control of.  They "set the scene" as it were, with some intial description before Deployment happens and the Troupe assumes their Duties.  The Ender is the inverse, declaring when a particular tale has run its course, and signaling to the Tracker that it's time to find a new story.  Occasionally, this position is combined, but it is often split, sometimes into two rotating positions.

-- Understudy: What it sounds like.  Often times, important positions (or Troubadors with many critical Duties) will have one or two Understudies who can jump in and cover their Duties in case they get taken out in the middle of a story.

NOTE: More Duty types may develop as I get the material ready for playtesting.  Suggestions are welcome.

Themes

Though your character starts out merely as an avatar of yourself, this changes over time, as the character takes on various Duties and becomes one with various elements of various stories.  After you've BEEN Hamlet, or Ahab, or Long John Silver, you're not quite the same person as you were before.  Eventually, your character becomes "you + every role you've ever been," in a hodge-podge of self and other.

How do you measure this?  By developing Themes that run throughout your work and the roles you've taken.  Some might be associated with your Duties (an Ender might choose "Tradgedy" for instance, and try to cut things off with a sufficiently sad but romantic conclusion), but that's not necessarily the case.  A Loki could just as easily pick a theme like "Rage" and introduce storms, earthquakes, and blood rains with frightening regularity.

Themes are rated by their strength on a scale of 1-9, with 1-3 representing Harmonies, 4-6 being Minor Themes, and 6-9 being Major Themes.  If a Theme manages to rise above 9, it becomes an Essential Theme, a permanent part of the Troubador's identity.

For a Theme to be raised, it must be expressed in a given story to the satisfaction of at least a majority of the Troupe.  Then, the player can pay X coins to raise the Theme 1 level.  Likewise, if a character wants to declare the beginning of a new Harmony, s/he should describe the new Theme to the Troupe, check for nodding heads and knowing smiles, and then pay X coins for the first level.

For a lesser coin cost, characters are allowed to "sustain" Themes without actually raising them.  This doesn't require the other players approval, but the character must at least satisfy themselves, that they have supported the Theme in a given story.  Sustaining often takes place at the end of a given story, before the Tracker breaks new ground, because...

Themes that are not raised or sustained in a given story drop a level before the next tale begins.

The Rest

As for the rest, you just insert the rest of the Universalis system, pull out some coins, and get ready to go.  Presto!  Immersive Universalis!  And they said it was impossible ;)

Characters, of course, regain coins through conflicts between themselves.  Odysseus fights his way through a storm, and the Protag bids coins against the Loki who issues a Challange.  Simple as pie.

Of course, I still have to write up the social contract in more detail, so the interactions between players and characters are more clear, but that's the general gist of the concept.

What do people think?

[Mike Holmes]

I think you're crazy. But in the mad-scientist sorta way. You go, mad game designer!

How are the duties assigned. Heh, I see similarities with the roles from COTEC, and instantly I'm asking the same questions.

Mike

[Jonathan Walton]

I think you're crazy. But in the mad-scientist sorta way. You go, mad game designer!

That's what I like to hear! :)

How are the duties assigned.

Bickering and finger-pointing.  No, really.

I'm not planning to have the rules specify too much about the allocation of Duties.  Instead, I'm going to offer a bunch of different models for how distribution and selection could work.  For groups that are used to having a GM, for instance, you might want to give a whole bunch of Duties to one character and then have them arbitrarily assign them to the other characters.  However, that's not really in the spirit of the game.

Ideally, in the Example of Play in my head, the characters first pick/elect a PC to a facilitating Admin Duty (yes, all this takes place IC!).  Then s/he moderates the Troupe while they divide up different Duties.  Now, not everything has to be covered before they start hecking into stories.  In fact, the game counts on the fact that you WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PLAN FOR EVERY CIRCUMSTANCE, so some people are going to have to step in on the fly and cover strange situations ("Um, is an earth spirit under the jurisdiction of an Oscar or a Loki?  What if it becomes a protagonist?  Does it switch to a new character's control?").  If you have an experienced group, you could just hack into a story and have people start volunteering to take over various components.  Still, it's probably better, in most cases, to go in with a plan, even a loose one.

The mechanic I forgot to mention was this: if your character is supposed to lose coins (which happens as a side effect of conflicts) but doesn't have any coins left, they get ejected from the story and others have to move in to cover their Duties.  As a bonus to those who get booted, the first person to go gets to automatically serve as Tracker for the next tale (since the rest of the group is catching up with them), but this'll still lead to in-group bickering and conflict, which is all completely intentional.  I can just hear the cries of "You intentonally removed me!" and "Did not!  I thought you had lots of coins left!" filling the room.

And, of course, there will always been conversations like "I just don't think Jason is cut out to be a Protag.  It's going to his head and he doesn't make room in the story for the rest of us.  Y'know, I really think _I_ would make a much better Protag..."  Which leads to great Gamism and Diplomacy-esque backstabbing (encouranged in the rules), where you intentionally create challanges not just to move the story along, but to get back at other members of the Troupe.

Yes, it's sick and twisted.  Will it be fun?  I certainly hope so.  Will it cause emotional turmoil?  One can only hope ;)

[Shreyas Sampat]

So, I don't know much about Universalis, so I'd like to know a little bit more about how SP and U interrelate...

As for the Duty set, it seems to be a pretty comprehensive list, unless your Troupe wants to get all theatrical and have special effects folk, pit musicians, etc etc.  Are Duties strictly social positions, or do they have mechanics associated with them (I'm thinking of my idea of the Human in Kathanaksaya, the player whose character has no representation in the game-world, but can still affect it)?

[Jonathan Walton]

Well, I really don't want to drift this topic away from Universalis more than it already has (I might have to take it to Game Design soon), but...

One of the things I've always admired about Universalis is that there's nothing that distingushes one player from another.  All the players have equivilant abilities as far as spending coins and creating story elements goes.  The difference is that different players will chose to spend their coins in different ways, because they enjoy different kinds of stories or story elements.

Storypunk, in a way, codifies these personal perferences in Duties.  So, if one character's Duty is being the "Storm Mother" (covering large conflicts, dangerous environmental conditions, and take-no-crap female Protags), it doesn't mean that s/he is incapable of doing other Duties, but that the social contract among the characters has specified certain primary responsibilities.  Ideally, each character (and their player) will feel a calling to perform their Duties, but this isn't necessarily the case.  You may have to perform some Duties that you don't particularly like, for the good of the Troupe and the stories themselves.  So, to answer your question, Duties are totally social contructs, with the same mechanics dictating how every kind of Duty is performed.

To answer your question about the relationship between SP and Universalis...  In Universalis, everyone's a GM who creates/controls story elements by purchasing power with coins, but it's mostly puppet-type control with isolated incidents of immersion (mostly in conversation between characters).  In Storypunk, then, everyone controls an uber-powerful PC who can change their environment by purchasing power with coins, but in order to control something, you have to become immersed in it, you have to become it.  Storypunk makes the story elements avatars of the PCs, who are, in turn, avatars of the players (though many would argue that since the characters don't really exist, there's a direct line of avatarism).

Does that help?