Orx: Alternating Choices in Stat Usage

[greyorm]

In Orx, you have three stats (Nasty, Brute, and Grok) each rated in sides of dice (ie: d4, d6, d8...etc). During a contest you choose to roll one stat -- you can roll any stat you like, no restrictions. However, there is currently no reason to choose to roll anything but your highest stat.

I want to change this.

As Orx is decidedly Gamist, the question arises: is having three stats, with no real reason to use any but the highest, counterproductive?

I've been thinking of scratching the idea and going to a one-stat system; however, two problems present themselves:

First, characters will have a smaller buffer zone protecting them from the GM's Fate rolls than they do now, as they will not be able to switch between stats to flatten out the damage over time. It will be a straight, quick drop punctuated by a few successes that will momentarily level-out the losses.

Second, I really like the idea of being able to use any stat for any roll because it encourages creative narratives describing solutions to circumstances, without as often defaulting to the standard "obvious" results. That is, if you have to incorporate your social trait into the success of your duel, you probably won't be describing your character's horrible strength and how he breaks his opponent's back with a patented orcish power-slam.

Currently, the only penalty to rolling your highest stat is that losing the roll reduces the stat. That's a rather weak penalty even if you want to keep it high "for later" as rolling a lower stat brings you that much closer to being zeroed in that stat.

Hence, I'd like to stay away from a punishment mechanic that removes player choice in stat, as such already exists in the system in the concept of zeroed stats being non-usable and lowered stats being less likely to be chosen. Instead, I'm trying to think of a benefit that could be provided to players who use a lower stat for resolution without being too seductive.

Currently, you can boost a stat by one die-size for your next roll by successfully adding a complication to another player's conflict; of course, the question in this case is why wouldn't you boost your highest stat to make it even more optimal?

Of course, another solution (as it were) is to leave it as is: leaving the choice of stat simply as Color without any overt mechanical effect, and just let regular old stat loss do the talking in regards to variations of stat choice (as your highest stat loses size, one of your lower stats will temporarily become the highest stat and thus the optimal choice).

Opinions?
Any obvious ideas I've overlooked?

[Mike Holmes]

A simple mechanical limit isn't the same as punishment. That is, if you were to rule that you couldn't use stat X a second time until both stat Y and stat Z were used, then the player would have to strategize which stat to use by predicting whether this was going to be the difficult conflict, or later ones were going to be worse. Adds a whole new dimension to the tactics, and ensures that the player will have to use all his stats in narration. Including the bad ones, which should lead to the sort of feel I think you're going for. Allow the players to break out of the cycle and use the stat they like by adding Fate dice to the GM's pool or something to shake things up.

That said, I'm sure you could figure out a way to reward using lesser abilities if that seems more appealing. For example, you could allow a player to add Metagame dice to a pool based on the number of steps that the employed stat is below their max. Thus, if I have D10 in my highest stat, and use a d4, that's 3 steps lower, resulting in me getting a d8 for my pool (one step gets a d4, two gets d6, etc). These could be used on a one time basis for re-rolls. Or somesuch (forgive me if that makes no sense, I'm not sure if I remeber the mechanics correctly).

I'm sure there's some incentive that you can give that should balance out, and still leave the power in the player's hands.

But consider the first idea, too. Has some interesting effects, IMO.

Mike

[Jack Spencer Jr]

As Orx is decidedly Gamist, the question arises: is having three stats, with no real reason to use any but the highest, counterproductive?

Hmm..
Perhaps a bonus for using a lower stat would entice players to attempt actions with their lower stat in the hopes of it raising.

Here's an idea that just suddenly came to me on this, so use it as you like.

The stats are built on a pool of points, as it were. Rolling on your highest stats can give you the option of raising that stat by taking a point from one of the other two. So rolling your highest stat allows you to raise it at the penalty of lowering one of your other two stats.

But, rolling your lowest stat allows you to gain a free point for that stat without taking it from either of the other two.

Example (this does not follow the Orx rules directly, but it should illustrate what I'm talking about here)

Stats 6 , 4, 2

Rolling the 6 stat allows the player to raise it by 1, but the point comes from one of the other stats. In this example, he takes it from the middle stat making the profile 7, 3, 2. On the next roll, the player decides to roll the lowest stat. This allows him to gain a point for free. It goes into this stat, and thus into his pool of points. The profile is now 7, 3, 3. The player now has two lowest stats and he may choose either or on his next roll.

As far as penalties, your system seems to work. It puts an element of risk on each dice roll. I would have a minimum for the three stats, d4 in your case or d2 if you prefer. In a case when the lowest stat is as low as it will go and a roll is failed, incurring a penalty, then the penalty comes off of the highest stats.

Such are my suggestions.

[Valamir]

I like Mike's idea, its simple to implement and I think would provide a degree of planning ahead regarding rolls.

I'm thinking of another possibilities that likely would take a little more work to implement

What if any time a stat was used successfully, the orc got a point in that stat representing his "reputation" in that area.  Use Brute alot, get a reputation for being Brutish.  

That's all well and good until your reptuation gets bigger than your die size.  At that point, you're too big for your britches and fate basically says..."oh, you think your Nasty 'eh?...well let me tell you, you're not THAT nasty...THIS is nasty".

So if a player does nothing but use the same high stat over and over it he will eventually build up a huge reputation...of the "writing checks that your body can't handle variety"...and this will be bad.

So how bad...not sure.  Perhaps an automatic Complication for using this stat for as long as the reputation remains too high.  Perhaps a -modifier to GM Fate rolls.  Whatever works.

To reduce reputation:  Fail twice iwith the stat in question, or attempting at least 1 roll with each of the other two stats (succeed or fail).

On the character sheet you could have 5 boxes for each stat...1 big box with 2 small boxes above and below.  In the big box you put hash marks every time you use that stat successfully.  Mark off one little box above each time you fail with that stat.  Reduce Rep by 1 when both are filled.  The boxes below are noted with the initial of the other two stats (A G and N below the Brute box).  Each time a stat is used the corresponding boxes under the other stats are marked...unless already marked.  When both boxes under a stat are filled lose a point of reputation.


Like I said, a little more involved, but it accomplishes something similar to Mike's idea without complete fiat.

[greyorm]

you couldn't use stat X a second time until both stat Y and stat Z were used, then the player would have to strategize which stat to use by predicting whether this was going to be the difficult conflict, or later ones were going to be worse...

I love it! I've got to playtest this! The suggestion about Fate Dice also neatly solves another problem I've been worried about: smart players working as a group -- even if their orcs aren't -- can optimize their play so that the gamemaster never gains a Fate die (which is an intentional part of the design). I found that Fate dice can thus be hard to come by.

add Metagame dice to a pool based on the number of steps that the employed stat is below their max...These could be used on a one time basis for re-rolls.

Hrm, that works, too...my immediate reaction is that it might shift play too much to the low-end of the scale, allowing players to rack up huge pools of dice to reroll.

I could circumvent that by only allowing one reroll die in the pool (or perhaps one per stat), and further complicate the situation by ruling that a reroll die must be discarded to be replaced, and the roll made with the low stat to replace it must also be successful (that is, if the contest roll fails the player does not get to add the die).

So, Bob with a d10 Brute rolls his d8 Nasty instead and succeeds, gaining a d4 reroll die for a stat. He saves it for use with his Grok later. Sometime later, Bob decides he wants to try for a higher reroll die than d4. In his next contest, he discards the die and rolls his d6 Grok instead of his Brute, but fails! He doesn't get to replace the discarded reroll die.

Have to think about that one...it's convoluted enough to add some extra tension and be really enjoyable. In this situation, the character sheet and counters would become even more central to play for purposes of tracking the various die information -- something I'm not really against.

Rolling on your highest stats can give you the option of raising that stat by taking a point from one of the other two...

Thanks for the contributing, Jack! I like the suggestion, but spending Fate points already allow you to buy your stats up to higher levels -- unless I'm misunderstanding? Is this only a temporary raise? How does it look over the long run? I'm leery of changing too much of the core system, but I'll keep this one in mind, I just want to make sure I understand it completely.

I would have a minimum for the three stats, d4 in your case or d2 if you prefer. In a case when the lowest stat is as low as it will go and a roll is failed, incurring a penalty, then the penalty comes off of the highest stats.

I don't know if you've given the full rules a complete read or not -- if you have I'd be very interested in what you think of the overall structure and presentation of the rules (a question I will be asking about next week, I don't want to hijack my own topic!), as the minimum is already set in the rules to d4.

So, if you lose a roll of a d4 stat you zero the stat, making it useless to you until you can heal it back up. I think leaving the die at d4 instead and having the penalty come off the highest stat would result in even less play of low stats, which would be counter to my intention.

any time a stat was used successfully, the orc got a point in that stat representing his "reputation"

Excellent! I like the idea of a Reputation score...it's very Orxish, in fact; I just don't like the amount of tracking required, for me this part of it doesn't jive with the rest of the rules, and I'm not sure how I'd tie it in to the rest of the rules seamlessly.

If I think of a good way to do it, though, I may!

[Christoffer Lernö]

You know, that reminds me of Demonspahn's "Aware".

In his game you had Instinct and Reasoning representing different ways for the suddenly-brought-to-awareness animals to solve problems.

They happened to use different rolling techniques, with one (Instinct) providing less variation, but more reliable results (basically nD2) and one more randomness but higher max (1D6+rating).

In addition "Reasoning" made you more and more quirky, which then was the downside to using it.

Aware is still in testing, but in play this mechanic seemed to work. Aware isn't a gamist game though.

Drawbacks for using stats (as suggested by Ralph) seems to echo Aware's mechanic. You could make rolling high would not only yield successes but also quirks or "reputation traits". You could include this in the rolling mechanism and make chances higher the higher the trait or something.

The method in Aware to actually use different types of die rolls for the traits introduced a strategic angle to the whole thing that also might be useful in some way for Orx.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Raven,

Here's an idea: the lower the attribute, when you succeed with it, the higher/more effective the result is.

That's totally non-traditional, non-intuitive, has nothing to do with "representing skill levels," and seems to me to be fun.

The worse you are at it, the better you do when it does actually work.

Best,
Ron

[Spooky Fanboy]

I'll second Ron's idea; orx as a species seem to survive by 'idiot luck', and that idea gets that across nicely. ;-)

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Thanks for the contributing, Jack! I like the suggestion, but spending Fate points already allow you to buy your stats up to higher levels -- unless I'm misunderstanding? Is this only a temporary raise? How does it look over the long run? I'm leery of changing too much of the core system, but I'll keep this one in mind, I just want to make sure I understand it completely.

You know, originally I had come up with the suggestion Ron posted, but I didn't because I got the impression that in Orx that there was no degree of success. I did a quick skim through the rules and will read it a tad more carefully later, and it appears that my assumption was correct. If I understand correctly, when rolling, you either succeed or fail and that's it. There is the Crippling Loss rule, but otherwise it's very straightforeward. It you succeed, the player gets to narrate events to the character's benefeit. If not, then the player gets to narrate to the character's detriment.

I'll see if I can't explain the idea I had a little so that you might be able to understand it and apply it to the system you already have.

Where I was coming from was in your original post here you had said you had three stats which were, for all intents and puroses, the same and could be rolled on any task. These stats could be rated differently. You have them rated by polyherdal dice, but that detail was neither here nor there as far as my thinking. You needed an incentive to roll the lower rated stats or else the players would simply roll their highest stat every time. Another feature you had mentioned was that failing a roll lowers the stat.

Based on this, I saw what you needed was some kind of direct benefeit for rolling your lowest stat to offset the double penalty of

[A] using a lower die and thus having a higher chance of failing in the first place

failing the dice roll the stat would then be lowered, making it even less attractive to roll later[/list:u]
The simple solution seemed to be if the roll is successful, then the stat goes up. I suppose a different gain would be appropriate. Looking through the rules it would either be gain (or losing?) a Fate point. but actually raising the stat, when the possible penalty is lowering it seemed more fair.

Based on this, I came up with the possibly overcomplicated method of how succedding in dice rolls raised a stat by lowering another stat. This made the Orc a pool of numbers that are allocated to the three stats and these points can shift dramatically depending on how they are used. Points can be lost from a stat, and thus the general point pool when rolls are failed but, as per my idea, gained only by rolling and succeding in the lowest stat.

This whole idea does skew how play works. I see that only by spending Fate can an Orc otherwise raise a stat, which carries it's own risk. It seems to me, the way you have it the stats are *potentially* going to remain low as they are lowered be failed rolls, which is a downward spiral. My suggestion *potentially* would keep all the stats high. We'd have to look at what balancing factors there are here.

One side note, since Grok is the only stat given an orc name, you might want to mention in the stat description that it is cleverness but the orcs simply call it Grok because cleverness has too many sylababables.

[Mike Holmes]

One side note, since Grok is the only stat given an orc name, you might want to mention in the stat description that it is cleverness but the orcs simply call it Grok because cleverness has too many sylababables.

If I'm not mistaken, Grok was invented by Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land" as a martian word meaning something like "to know something by being one with the universe, and therefore with the object in question".

Mike

[greyorm]

Heya,

Sorry about the delay in responses, I was away for the weekend stuff with parents and family and such and just arrived back at home late last night.

Over the weekend I gave serious thought to Ron's suggestion of degrees of success, because Spooky is right: it does fit the idiot-luck idea of a standard Orx game perfectly. The problem, of course, is as Jack described: Orx doesn't have degrees of success, you either succeed or fail.

So I thought about how I could add a degrees of success to Orx, and how they would fit in the game. Though the few ideas I came up with ultimately didn't work, a few hinged on my throwing out the idea of Scenes as written which did get me thinking about the way Scenes and Conflicts were set up, and how I'd written things.

I realized the current text is incoherent in a number of places, so in and effort to make certain everyone is one the same page with me, here's a more coherent (I hope) explanation of the way Orx should play:

The best way to describe it is: If Orx were a play, the dice would form the script to be followed by the players.

Unlike traditional games, you do not declare a task or an action before you roll. Win or lose, the dice tell you what happened so that you can narrate the event, and you don't know what's happening until you describe it, according to the dice.

The dice provide definition for the forthcoming narrative -- all you know after a standard roll is that you're engaging in a specific type of conflict and you've either succeeded or failed at it -- the actual details are left undefined until the narration.

For example, a Nasty roll is a Social roll, so all a player rolling a Nasty die knows is that some sort of social event/conflict has occurred; it is now up to the player to describe what that event was, its outcome, and how that outcome came to be. For example, was it a terse word with the guards at the gate? A discussion of which fork in the trail to take? Did the guardsman's surly attitude put the character off for the rest of the day? Did the character feel ignored and belittled by the others even though they chose the branch of the trail he demanded?

The details of the narrative can be further restricted by the use of Descriptors and Complications, as well as the GM's opposing die (which can set the specifics of the situation/event that must be overcome, such as a dragon's breath, a sturdy oak door, or a puzzle) -- each is an element that must be included in the narrative after the roll.

As well, others involved can interject into and add to this narrative, as long as their actions do not affect the end result or the established elements -- in most cases, they will have to have rolled as well, so their chosen elements must also be utilized.

I'm trying to clarify this because it is an important, if not the central aspect of play: I specifically state in the text that you cannot speak or act in character until you roll the dice. I know this tripped up my playtesters (and even myself) repeatedly because the way in which play was handled was so ill-defined, and so some IC chatter was done without rolls.

This is why rolls in Orx are conflict rolls, not task rolls: you could narrate a long exchange of blows with an enemy ending with either your defeat or victory as the events of the roll. Or in the case of the Nasty roll above, you could narrate the growling, gnashing conversation between the members of the orcish warband as they vie for dominance in who leads and where they go next.

Also, one of my guides for the design is that Orx should be fully playable without any sort of narration occurring at all, as just a dice game.

The simplest way to play Orx: the GM gets X number of dice per "turn" by which to befoul the players and drive them towards zero. He keeps this die secret until the players have chosen and rolled their own dice, added Descriptor dice and Complications to reduce chances for another.

Anyone can use/borrow a Fate die (or dice) to roll again. Dice are marked down or increased (for the next roll). Fate checks are rolled if necessary (if an orc zeroes).

And it continues in like fashion until the GM is out of dice for that turn, and then for each turn afterwards, until the players have been put out of the game by the GM.

[Spooky Fanboy]

Here's an idea, so as to not wonk anything out of alignment:

If a player uses his second lowest (ie. middle) die in a contest, and succeeds, he gets a Fate die to use for a future conflict. If he uses his lowest die to roll, and succeeds, he gets two. These Fate dice do not put the orc in debt, or give the GM access to Fate dice, or whatever nasty side effect fate dice have.  (I forget. Sorry!!) Basically, he gets some "hazard pay bonuses" for leading with his weaknesses instead of his strengths.

[greyorm]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone!

This discussion has helped clarify my thinking process quite a bit in regards to what to do with the stats and how I want it to interact overall with play, so I've made my decision at this point -- I will be playtesting a few of these ideas to see what each feels like and results in in actual play.

As it stands, I will be playtesting both alternating stat usage and banking bonus dice for using lower stats since I think these can most easily be implemented without creating too much complexity.

In the meanwhile, I will be moving on to other items in the game text that arose as needful of my attention. When all that is done, I plan to report in Actual Play as to how each worked out; for those interested, I will be announcing playtests on the Indie Netgaming group.

I enjoyed everyone's ideas, however, and I'm seriously considering some of them for use in Ninja Kitty, Samurai Dog, but more on that when Orx is finished.

PS:

If I'm not mistaken, Grok was invented by Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land" as a martian word meaning something like "to know something by being one with the universe, and therefore with the object in question".

Mike's correct -- this topic came up on the RPG-Create Yahoo list when I was originally designing the system. Interesting thing is that I've never read "Stranger in a Strange Land" or anything of Heinlein's (that I recall), so "Grok" was an invented word for me that I doubtlessly pulled out of the subconscious vault having heard it used somewhere in context.