Volatile and Non-Volatile Traits (for want of better terms)

[Ben Morgan]

Had an idea the other day, don't know if anyone else has come up with something similar. It revolves around separating elements of a character into two groups, for purposes of quantifying protagonism via authorial power. Not even sure what to call them really, so at the moment they're Volatile and Non-Volatile Traits.

Non-Volatile Traits are things that pertain to the character that are absolutely inviolate. For example, if you assign "Fastest Gun in the West" as a Non-Volatile Trait, then they will always shoot first. Mechanically, it could be said that a Non-Volatile Skill is something you always succeed at. A Non-Volatile Background Trait is something that will not ever change (Like Conan's "Destined to be King"). Keep in mind, the purpose of these is thematic support. Now, "Fastest Gun in the West" is not an excuse to wade through every combat, bustin' caps without fear of reprisal. It's there to support a premise, such as questioning whether "shoot first, ask questions later" is a morally valid philosophy.

Volatile Traits are things that can be screwed with, or challenged, or whatever. This includes "traditional" skills (challenged through die rolls), background elements (like "your bank account just got wiped out"), and relationships (like "Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father").

The idea came to me when I was thinking about a Legend of the Five Rings game that a friend of mine was running a couple of years ago. Towards the end of the campaign, there were several tremendously sweeping changes to the game world, some of which totally screwed with one of the characters' concepts on a very basic level. Group dysfunction aside, it got to the point where the player in question didn't want to play anymore.

I was trying to explain this situation to my brother, and his first reaction was,"why not just play out the reactions of the character to this new information?" Then I gave him an example that hit home: He's playing a cleric in a D&D game right now, and is very keen on exploring a difference of opinion between his own beliefs and the established doctrine of the church (basically, they worship St. Cuthbert in his aspect of The Great Protector, and he worships St. Cuthbert in his aspect of Merciless Judge). I said "How would you (as a player) feel if Marius woke up one day and found out that St. Cuthbert didn't really exist, and that The Book of The Cudgel was written by a couple of goblins as a joke?" Now, he could certainly try to bite the bullet, take it in stride, and play out his character's reactions to this new development (there would be LOTS of crushed skulls). But that's not what Marius is about, from an authorial point of view. Marius' story is not about questioning one's beliefs, it's about exploring the line between faith and uncompromising extremism (or even tyranny). Marius' status as a protagonist comes in part from his absolutely unshakable belief that what he is doing is right, and that without a shadow of a doubt, St. Cuthbert looks down on him from heaven and says "there is my true servant".

Mainly, I'm looking a way to give the player the power to say, in a very tangible and mechanically relevant way, "This stuff (gestures to the left) is what my character is all about; don't mess with it. But this stuff over here (gestures to the right) is up for grabs."

The interplay of Volatile and Non-Volatile Traits can help you to define a character's theme. To continue the example from above, "Fastest Gun in the West" as a Non-Volatile Trait, along with "Long Lost Brother" as a Volatile Trait can result in some interesting situations. Maybe you were a little too quick on the draw, and the man in black you just killed turns out to be your long-lost brother. On the other hand, taking "Long Lost Brother" as a Non-Volatile Trait means that though the character will never give up the search, the player knows that the character will never be successful in finding him.

-- Ben

[Andrew Martin]

Not even sure what to call them really,...

How about: Violable and Inviolable traits?

Volatile reminds me of solid CO2 boiling off.

[Mike Holmes]

This sounds very much like Fang's Sin Non Qua technique. Basically the character equivalents to Genre Expectations.

Sounds OK to me. Essentially, these are statements up front about what the game is to be about, and the framework for it. That is, these sorts of traits are about establishing the boundaries of what people want to play. If I take "Shoots Fast", that says I don't want to look at a game in which my character is crippled and cannot compete in fast draw competitions. That, in fact, the game should be about such competitions. As opposed to "Fastest Draw" which means that the player wants to investigate shooting folks (maybe the moral implications), but not anything regarding losing gunfights.

I'm just reiterating, obviously. So this is just to say that I think the idea has real merit, IMO. I'm waiting on a good implementation for a complete game.

This actually happens in Universalis, occasionally in setting up Tenets. There is a Tenet type called a Role where you can state that a character is , "The Fastest Gun in the West". As opposed to "Hired Gunslinger" or some such archetype. The idea is that the Role should indicate what sort of play makes sense around the character. You'll find that even just a noun and an adjective can suffice to be very informative as to what's appropriate.

What I like about how Roles work is that you can try to go against them when it seems appropriate to do so. It's easy to knock down, and thus protect a character's Role. So these attacks on the Role only occur when it's dramatically very appropriate.

Thus in the first gunfight, "The Fastest Draw" is going to win, and atttempts to thwart this will probably be Challenged away. But as the story winds down, I ca definitely see someone throwing a gunfighting Complication at the character, and, given it's dramatic timing, allowing it to go off. Essentially a climactic decision as to whether the character remains "The Fastest Draw" or becomes "Formerly the Fastest Draw" or just plain dead. :-)

Mike

[Bankuei]

Hi Ben,

Mike beat me to it.  Definitely check out Fang's Sin Non Qua.  Aside from that, what you're talking about is a core character concept.   It's about the same thing as playing a superhero and the GM steps up and takes away your powers for the whole campaign without your permission.

What's interesting to note, is that there is a lot of core character concepts that get all stepped on in many games, simply because players have very little input into conflict or outcome, both of which are very good at demonstrating those core concepts.  For example, if we take the idea of a character, "Struggling with own morality, but ultimately good hearted", fighting orcs all day won't bring that forward.  Only a moral conflict would bring that sort of issue forward.

Again, this is a big issue of communication with the group(players and GM) and also of input on the part of players into conflict, outcome, and expression of character.

Chris

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ben and everyone,

Check out the Item collecting for some useful thoughts on this topic, especially the notion of a character as a "thematic bundle." I also think the GNS material in that thread is worth a review for a lot of people, and that the internally linked thread "The class issue" will provide some vocabulary for talking about players and characters too.

Best,
Ron

[Walt Freitag]

Hi Ben,

That's a good observation. Putting volatile and non-volatile under the player's control is a good first step, but I think the principle can be taken a lot farther.

The as yet unnamed system I'm working on (working titles are "Confliction" and "Turbulence") takes the idea of relative volatility completely to heart. Everything stated on a character sheet is either a conflict or is linked to a conflict, even the most basic stats -- so, for example, for a character to be unusually physically strong, there must be a reason for the character to be strong that relates to at least one of the character's conflicts. Such a reason could be as simple as the character having a burning desire to become a great warrior, or as complex as the player intending to explore situations where the effectiveness of individual fortitude versus group cooperation is in question.

Where this intersects with your notion of volatility is that conflicts vary in importance or scope or "power" in a way that relates directly to your volatility. No conflict can be resolved or otherwise negated (e.g. by the death of an antagonist or the death of the player-character) until a sufficient number of progress points have fed into it during play. The larger the "power" value of a conflict, the more progress points are required and hence the less "volatile" the situation that supports it is allowed to be. This mechanism provides the protection of protagonism that you appear to be looking for.

At the same time, the conflicts are also the resource that the GM draws on to introduce adversity and complications during play. So just as the players can only create characteristics that are important to an extant conflict, the GM can only introduce stuff (like the oft-exampled chasm or Nazi submarine) that's important to an extant conflict and in reasonable proportion to the importance of the conflict. My intention is to have this work by the same rules at every scale, from the largest-scale conflicts to the individual fights (where the "progress points" toward resolving the conflict might look a lot like traditional hit points). The less volatile a conflict, the more "fuel" it provides for the GM over the long term. I'm trying to make this self-balancing against abuse, something that could be a problem in your pure volatile-non-volatile scheme ("My character is perfectly physically healthy and that's non-volatile").

To illustrate how the distinction between more and less volatility would work, consider a character losing a sword during a brawl. If the sword was picked up by the character off a dead body earlier in the brawl, then it is a component of the brawl conflict only. If someone runs off with it during the brawl, there are no consequences other than to the immediate tactical situation, and if the player chooses to pursue the thief to get it back, the GM is free to decide that it's already been broken and melted down for scrap. But if the sword is Stormbringer or Excalibur, then it's linked to a much larger conflict and is inviolate unless that larger conflict is resolved or transformed. That doesn't mean it can't be taken away, but that it must remain "in play" as a part of the conflict. So it cannot be destroyed or taken entirely beyond the character's ability to recover it. Having an NPC take it away means the GM is creating a new sub-conflict of the larger conflict. The sub-conflict's power pool is established by allocating from the larger conflict's power pool. The GM can draw in turn on the sub-conflict's power pool to generate sub-sub-conflicts (further complications) as the character tries to resolve the sub-conflict by getting the sword back.

As a waggish physicist once wrote:

Big whorls have little whorls
That feed on their velocity.
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.

(Hence the "Turbulence" working title.)

Whether or not some conflicts (and the areas of backgound that support them) can be completely inviolate depends on the style of play. In your "Fastest Gun / Long Lost Brother" example, the Fastest Gun trait would be volatile if it were linked directly to the Long Lost Brother conflict. Find the brother, give up the gun. (Though I'm working on options for players to transfer traits to new conflicts when conflicts are resolved. Find the brother, find a new cause.) But if the Fastest Gun trait were linked to a larger conflict (e.g. Fight For Honor And Family), it wouldn't be as volatile. And if it were an independent conflict in itself (Must Be The Fastest Gun), it could be as volatile or non-volatile as the player wishes -- though preferably it should be on the less volatile side, as its resolution is likely to be fatal.

It's good to have this range of options, because in some styles of play normally non-volatile things like "fastest gun" become volatile. Whether or not the character can or should become or remain the fastest gun can become an issue explored in play. Some players might prefer that Conan never actually wins his kingdom as his quest to do so drives a hundred other adventures. Others, however, might like to role-play Conan winning his kingdom. In most comics and supers TV series, villains rarely invade the heroes' bases of operations or learn their secret identities; in supers movies, they almost invariably do so. In a game set in World War II, the war itself should be available as a major power source to fuel other conflicts, without resolution of that conflict being a real possibility (a truly astronomical progress point threshold). But who knows? Maybe some group somewhere wants to go and play out actually winning the war.

Without all this complexity from a system that doesn't exist yet, just laying out the volatile vs. non-volatile expectations on the character sheet sounds like a good idea, as long as you don't expect (or can prevent) abuse and as long as you have provisions for changing from one to the other if the player's priorities, interests, or expectations shift during play.

- Walt

[Emily Care]

No conflict can be resolved or otherwise negated (e.g. by the death of an antagonist or the death of the player-character) until a sufficient number of progress points have fed into it during play. The larger the "power" value of a conflict, the more progress points are required and hence the less "volatile" the situation that supports it is allowed to be. This mechanism provides the protection of protagonism that you appear to be looking for.

So you may have a bit of a dramatic count down, as you get closer to the requisite number, the tension mounts and the conflict comes closer to resolution or transformation.

Keep us informed. Sounds great, Walt.

Ben,  there may be some value to alchemical changes of non-volatile to volatile when the time is right.  You may have thought of this already, but giving the player the right to chose the time for the emergence of dynamic change might function something like Walt's "fuel" levels. The non-volatile (inert?) trait may gather its own momentum and be triggered into dynamic change someday. It's like seeds, some seeds sprout right away. Others wait in the soil, waiting for the right combination of light and temperature to grow. Or perhaps that could be a third category.

--Emily Care

[Ben Morgan]

Hey,

All:

Thanks, guys, this is going great. I've got some really nifty ideas that may start to be forming into some sort of system... well, someday. Soon. Seriously. (okay, I'll quit it now)

Andrew:

Those are good terms, but they kinda don't roll off the tongue the way I want them to. Right now, I'm leaning toward Fixed/Mutable, or something like that.

Mike & Chris:

I will definitely read up on Scattershot more. I probably should have been doing all along.

Ron:

This definitely ties in with the concept of "niche protection". Thanks for reminding me of this thread, I had forgotten about it, but it probably stuck there in the back of my head while thinking about this idea. (As an aside, one of the things I like the most about roles in octaNe is the rule that no two players can play the same role. This goes a long way toward making each character unique.)

Walt:

I am really liking the idea of linking each trait to a specific conflict. Then you can link the characters together by conflicts, which makes them more dynamic. Hope to see more of this soon.

I'm not too worried about abuse. I went out of my way to make sure I have good players in my group that I trust. No rule system is abuse-proof. In my mind, with the proper attitude behind it, even a non-volatile (fixed?) trait like "My character is perfectly physically healthy" is perfectly valid. This trait specifically brings to mind the "Ogre Luck" idea that was mentioned in another thread recently.

I like Turbulence, by the way.

[Andrew Martin]

Those are good terms, but they kinda don't roll off the tongue the way I want them to. Right now, I'm leaning toward Fixed/Mutable, or something like that.

Mutable and Immutable. :)

[Ben Morgan]

Immutable.

Dammit, that works. There's no arguing with a term like that. I like it.

Emily:

I guess we cross-posted. I am currently working on coming up with some sort of system to deal with changing a trait from one type to another. In my mind, such a conversion represents a major thematic change for the character and their story. It may come down to something as simple as "flip two traits (one mutable becomes immutable, and at the same time, another immutable trait becomes mutable)".

Mainly, I'm trying to see how I can integrate this whole thing with some of my other ideas, such as retroactively defined traits (similar to Hero Wars' develop-in-play option), or "what's on the character sheet is not the sum total of the character". I'm also trying to work the idea of not-necessarily-chronological-stories into the mix. At this point, an instant-benefit reward system ("Advantage Now") seems the best thing. Give out points for cool roleplaying or something like that, and these points are immediately useful (as bonus dice maybe). The standard "power buildup" character advancement model obviously won't really fit, as I'm imagining a system where you can pretty much rewrite your character from scratch between each story, and in fact, I would probably encourage this. Actually, this is the sort of thing where, depending on the setting, even continuity regarding characters and their abilities would take a back seat to "what looks cool".

-- Ben

[Emily Care]

I am currently working on coming up with some sort of system to deal with changing a trait from one type to another. In my mind, such a conversion represents a major thematic change for the character and their story. It may come down to something as simple as "flip two traits (one mutable becomes immutable, and at the same time, another immutable trait becomes mutable)".

I was thinking much along the same lines.  If you are following the trail (so to speak) of a trait that is mutable, which then gets resolved, it would makes sense to have another trait become mutable even.  If you are looking to use the traits as theme bait.

Actually, this is the sort of thing where, depending on the setting, even continuity regarding characters and their abilities would take a back seat to "what looks cool".

Ah, excellent. No Myth characterization? You might be surprised how much continuity can be maintained even with allowing new info to surface. Why should we know all about a character at the start? It can actually get in the way at times.  What a character means, so to speak, the issues their experiences and psyche can address, often develop during play, and interacts with that of the other characters (I'm not even driving at narrativist play here, exploration of character is all I'm talking about, in whatever fashion) and lots of traits that seemed cool and interesting at the start can end up as so much baggage.  

Good luck! Sounds like an interesting project.

Regards,
Em