Refreshing Rain: Tugging At My Heartstrings

[Shreyas Sampat]

Jeph's recent thread on his new game Pagoda prompted me to get back to work on my own wuxia game, Refreshing Rain.  (There are also a couple of threads about it.)  I've been batting around the idea of how to deal with one important wuxia trope: the interplay of conflicting emotions and shifting relationships.  I'll post a summary of the game as it lies, and then discuss how to model these phenomena within that system.

Characters in Refreshing Rain have five Virtues: Poise, Compassion, Conviction, Grace, and Quickness.  These represent the character's capabilities.  Each Virtue is associated with an Element: Water, Earth, Wood, Metal, Fire; these represent the manner in which the character's abilities are manifested, and affect the way they interact with other abilities.  We call the conjunction of a Virtue and Element an Aspect, like Water Poise.  The effective value of these is called Harmony; it measures how strongly an Aspect is linked to the cycle of elements external to the character.  An Aspect with 0 Harmony is very weak, while one with 5 Harmony is prodigiously strong.

The Elements are linked in two cycles, Creative and Destructive.  They are ordered this way ( the > symbol means "Creates" or "Destroys"):
Creative: Water > Wood > Fire > Earth > Metal > Water...
Destructive: Water > Fire > Metal > Wood > Earth > Water...

When characters come into conflict, they choose a Virtue to base the conflict upon.  A draw of Ma Jiang tiles determines the winner; Creation and Destruction, modulated by Harmony, affects some stuff here.  The winner gets to keep one of the tiles drawn, to use at the end of the scene.

The Sky is a Go board with stones that represent the characters in the story; their spatial arrangement represents the relationships between them.  The players can spend tiles to move around various "Planets" on the board; these motions of the Planets can trigger scenes by moving through relationships, or cause characters' Harmony scores to increase or decrease.

So, the Sky provides us with a convenient way to deal with conflicting emotions: tie them to relationships.  We record each relationship that a character has on the sheet, and assign it a Tension score.  Any time a scene involving a relationship ends, each character's Tension for that relationship rises or falls.  A character's highest Harmony score sets a threshold for how much Tension he can bear; of any one of his relationships hits this Tension level, then a scene must happen where one of two things occurs: either the Tension is released, or the character destroys himself.

My Question Is, does this sound as if it would work?  Is it forcing things too much?  Does anyone see any potential problems with this system?

[Mike Holmes]

How far along are you with the actual mechanics of how the planets move, what each tile can do?

The thing is that players only get to author if their characters win, right? Which means that relationship changes only happen in the context of a character success. Are you intending to make the conflict portion of the game Gamist? If so, that's fine.

But otherwise, I'd think about the idea of allowing tiles for losers as well. Maybe you draw a second tile, and the winner gets to choose. Or the player always gets the tile, but it has a different meaning in the context of a win or a loss.

Otherwise it seems a little strange that things only change with success. It would seem to me that failure is just as strong a catalyst for change as success. But, again, if it's your intent to promote Gamism in the conflict resolution, this should be fine.

Mike

[Shreyas Sampat]

I have the mechanics for Planet motion completed; I just didn't post them here because they're not immediately relevant.  They're in the thread entitled "Refreshing Rain: The Relationship Sky", possibly the third RR thread I linked to in this thread's initial post.

The idea is that in a scene, a character will probably get a number of tiles, so that during the astrology phase, there's another level of conflict where players jockey to trigger scenes they they want to play out.  It turns out that this part of the game is a pretty Gamist approach...

The tile-winning works this way, currently: About six tiles are drawn, and the winner takes only the lowest-ranking tile.  This is basically because I want the tile-spending mechancs to be suppressed in the early game, and slowly take on a more central role.  If I were to give losers a tile as well, then perhaps the winner could choose a tile out of the loser's draw to keep, and choose a tile out of his own hand to give the loser.  The tiles have strict, unchanging meanings, by the way; otherwise that alternative could be a cool thing to look into.  (Like, you have two tile hands, one that lets you do things for yourself and one that lets you do things to others...)

One thing that's important to me is that the mechanic, while providing differentiation between characters, still has a pretty reasonable chance of either character wnning; differential effectiveness emerges in the long-term.
The way I tried to bring this about is such:
Each player draws three tiles, and they compare the second-highest; the higher tile wins, unless:
One Element is Created by the other; the Created Element draws an extra tile.
One Element Destroys the other; the Destroyed element chooses the third-highest tile.
If either player draws a Guardian (there are eight of these in 144 cards), he wins the conflict automatically.
Since this system is so complex, I haven't dared look at the math.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Just for anyone who's interested, I've updated the Refreshing Rain page at my website; basically all my Rain work is up there now.

[ADGBoss]

Possibility for the Loser

If your like me rolls and draws almost never go your way.  So I tend to build up alot of eextra frustration and motivation when playing.   Also, we see in anime and oriental literature the effect of being on the losing end all the time builds pressure, both physical and spiritual, that is released in an orgy of energy at some point.

So, what if the loser gives up the Tile, but gains a marble of motivation. Once they get 5 Marbles they can force a re-draw ie the conflict begins again from thebeginning, the old result being tossed out.  Then the 5 marbles are turned in. Or if they have 10 Marbles they can "Call The Guardian" and AutoWin that Conflict.  15 Marbles allows you to beat even a Guardian. (Thats alot of pent up Motivation)

Its still very Gamist but jockeying for Celestial Position often is.

Sean
ADGBoss

[Shreyas Sampat]

Rather than introduce a third Resource into the game, I revised the tile-gaining mechanism so that each player gets a tile at the end of each conflict.  This seems to be a much more elegant and effective way to do things to me: rather than breaking out of the tile system, it works with the tile system.

Besides which, certainly in anime frustration means something... but I don't see a similar phenomenon in the wuxia source, and Rain is strictly wuxia rather than anime.

On the other hand, there is the element of relationship stress... maybe in a Tension scene, there is some mechanical benefir for the character having a breakdown.  This seems to parallel the source, though it lacks grace.

[ADGBoss]

Working within the Tile system certainly is much cleaner and more effective. and also your right it was early I had forgotten the Wuxia connection :)

This really intrigues me though, the whole system it has... dunno something flavorful about it


Sean
ADGBoss