Ed Designs A Game: Topos

[ejh]

Oh, don't worry, Paul -- I just rearranged the whole damn structure of the game, bringing it closer to what was original and unique about it, and removing all the complexity.

Everything's different now... :)

Hope I don't scare my playtesters away!

http://www.lostthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/Topos?version=10

[Bill_White]

I like the general idea of this game, and the implementation in both the revised and previous version; I agree that trying to keep the structure of the rules simple is a good guiding principle.

I was interested in something that happened in the on-going game:  One player tried to establish a scene wherein transpired a clandestine meeting, but then the other players seemed to "dog-pile" on with stealthy observers, causing one player to have a character complain about the publicity!  Does that jibe with what you experienced?

It's interesting to try to come up with cost structures that provide incentives for what you want to happen, and disincentives for what you don't--including topical "violations" by other players.  I came up with this:

-- You pay to write; maybe 1 pt per 100 words.
-- At the end of your turn, you identify topoi:
     -- new ones you've introduced (maybe up to 3)
     -- established ones you've visited (any number).
     -- emergent ones (i.e., ones that you've seen in other players' turns, but you're articulating it for the first time and visiting it in your post).

You get 0 points for introducing new topoi.  The player who introduced an established topos you've visited gets 2 pts (if you introduced it, you only get 1 pt).  You get 1 pt for articulating and visiting an emergent topos, and so does the player in whose turn you "saw" the unarticulated topos.  Once you've articulated it, any time it gets visited, both you and the other player get 1 pt each.  You can't articulate an emergent topos from one of your own previous turns.

After your turn, another player can claim "damages" for topical violations:  you give 2 points to any player who can identify a topos they established that your turn violates.  Note that this is the only zero-sum point transfer; in all other cases, points are created out of thin air.

This pays less attention to issues of game balance than to trying to make it so that there are incentives to "read into" what other players write, and thus to collaborate more closely.  What do you think?

Bill

[Mike Holmes]

I'm reposting this from a PM to Ed. It crosses a lot of ideas with Bill:


Very nice in general [refers to the new revision]. The part about not getting points for visiting your own topoi is brilliant. That means that there has to be interchange.

I still think that for a true economy to bloom you might need to have someting be pressurizing. In RL you have to eat. If you didn't you could probably get by without a job if you really wanted to (you could live in a cave).

What if the players all just decided to tell five different stories? And didn't establish any Topoi? Or if they did, nobody paid them any attention. Since there's no problem with "running out", players have no automatic incentive to cross-polinate. Not that I think they would ignore each other; just that they can.

So, at the lowest level, have some diminishing commodity (like food). What I'd do is say that each time a player posts it costs a Point. What this does is simply inform the player that they can't exist as an island. They have to "set up shop" and start exploiting each other's Topoi.

Now, other than attracting players to make the kind of story that you want, why make Topoi? There's a strong mechanical incentive against it, namely the cost. In a real economy, there's the concept of "mutual benifit for exchanged goods". Now one can say that players might work on a "rub my back and I'll rub yours" mode, but what's to stop a third party from preying? That is, not setting up their own Topoi, and using yours.

OTOH, why worry when the only thing that's worth fighting over is the story itself, and "preying" players aren't getting much for their Points. So it will work finbe in the end. But there's an opportunity here. Why not give Currency to both the visiting and establishing characters? The Royalties rule. So it people visit not only do they get rewarded, but the player making the Topoi get's rewarded, thus incentivizing players to do it mechanically.

The other advantage to this is that it gives the players an incentive to ensure that the Topoi is really worth visiting. I mean, it already behooves them to do so in terms of the story, of course, but this backs that up mechanically.

That could be inflationary, however. Acutally, I contend that the system already is; for every Point that goes out paying for Topoi, you'll see more Points in the economy after only two visits. The only drain on teh economy is spending to protect avatars. But that seems to me to be too little. First, I'd put in the rule about a turn costing a Point to combat this a little. But you might need even more, especially if you use Royalties.

What I'd do is this. Have the currency that players garner from some end of the process be the formerly discussed "reward currency". Call em reward tokens or something. Basically, the only use of reward tokens is that when a player accumulates 5, they become a Point. Anyhow, allow this currency to be transfered at any time for anything, but not Points which can only be used for the transactions in question (and cannot be converted back into Tokens).

Then you have some of the value of the game being taken out in the conversion. And another way to interact between players as well. As to what "end" of the process to use the reward tokens, perhaps this is the royalty that the player gets.

A more simple way to drain Points from the economy would be to just charge more for turns. In any case, you want the drain on the economy to balance the rate at which you want people to have to visit Topoi. This is the defining pace adjuster of this mechanic.

The idea in all this is to have the mechanics back up the player motives at every step of the way. This double reinforcement will help to ensure that players are informed as to what they're supposed to be doing, and to push these activities mechanically as well. Hopefully making for a more energetic game.

There are probably other ways you can think of.

Mike

[ejh]

(Making public, at Mike Holmes' request, some comments of his and my replies, in private messages.)

Very nice in general. The part about not getting points for visiting your own topoi is brilliant. That means that there has to be interchange.  
 
I still think that for a true economy to bloom you might need to have someting be pressurizing. In RL you have to eat. If you didn't you could probably get by without a job if you really wanted to (you could live in a cave).  
 
What if the players all just decided to tell five different stories? And didn't establish any Topoi? Or if they did, nobody paid them any attention. Since there's no problem with "running out", players have no automatic incentive to cross-polinate. Not that I think they would ignore each other; just that they can.  
 
So, at the lowest level, have some diminishing commodity (like food). What I'd do is say that each time a player posts it costs a Point. What this does is simply inform the player that they can't exist as an island. They have to "set up shop" and start exploiting each other's Topoi.  
 
Now, other than attracting players to make the kind of story that you want, why make Topoi? There's a strong mechanical incentive against it, namely the cost. In a real economy, there's the concept of "mutual benifit for exchanged goods". Now one can say that players might work on a "rub my back and I'll rub yours" mode, but what's to stop a third party from preying? That is, not setting up their own Topoi, and using yours.  
 
OTOH, why worry when the only thing that's worth fighting over is the story itself, and "preying" players aren't getting much for their Points. So it will work finbe in the end. But there's an opportunity here. Why not give Currency to both the visiting and establishing characters? The Royalties rule. So it people visit not only do they get rewarded, but the player making the Topoi get's rewarded, thus incentivizing players to do it mechanically.  
 
The other advantage to this is that it gives the players an incentive to ensure that the Topoi is really worth visiting. I mean, it already behooves them to do so in terms of the story, of course, but this backs that up mechanically.  
 
That could be inflationary, however. Acutally, I contend that the system already is; for every Point that goes out paying for Topoi, you'll see more Points in the economy after only two visits. The only drain on teh economy is spending to protect avatars. But that seems to me to be too little. First, I'd put in the rule about a turn costing a Point to combat this a little. But you might need even more, especially if you use Royalties.  
 
What I'd do is this. Have the currency that players garner from some end of the process be the formerly discussed "reward currency". Call em reward tokens or something. Basically, the only use of reward tokens is that when a player accumulates 5, they become a Point. Anyhow, allow this currency to be transfered at any time for anything, but not Points which can only be used for the transactions in question (and cannot be converted back into Tokens).  
 
Then you have some of the value of the game being taken out in the conversion. And another way to interact between players as well. As to what "end" of the process to use the reward tokens, perhaps this is the royalty that the player gets.  
 
A more simple way to drain Points from the economy would be to just charge more for turns. In any case, you want the drain on the economy to balance the rate at which you want people to have to visit Topoi. This is the defining pace adjuster of this mechanic.  
 
The idea in all this is to have the mechanics back up the player motives at every step of the way. This double reinforcement will help to ensure that players are informed as to what they're supposed to be doing, and to push these activities mechanically as well. Hopefully making for a more energetic game.  
 
There are probably other ways you can think of.  
 
Mike

I'm gonna have to think on this stuff.  There's a certain purity to the way it is now.  The only thing you can do to get points, is do things that other people have decided to reward you for.  And the only thing that you can do with those points is reward people for doing things you like (with the exception of the Avatar rule, which is the only element of coercion in the game: you can force people not to tread on your Avatar's brain).

I have a feeling that spiralling point values, if that does happen, will balance themselves out by means of inflation -- if everybody's sitting on 40 Points, it's gonna take a 5 point Topos even to tempt them.  No problem there.  People are going to be bumping up their Topoi to keep up with inflation.

I have a feeling that if somebody just "whores a topos" -- visiting it again and again trivially -- the owner of the topos is going to get bored or wise up and realize he could be getting more bang for his buck, and mutate his topos into something that is more demanding to fulfill, or replace it entirely.  There's zero motivation to make a topos that's easy for people to get lots of points from, unless you want to foster a point inflation orgy -- and again, that should be something the rules can deal with, point values will just all have to inflate.

And replacing or mutating Topoi is an ongoing point burning mechanism.

Royalties, for me, break the "you only get points by doing something someone else wants" concept of the game; I'll consider them as a fix if I find the current system broken, but intuitively they don't seem like they fit right now.

Hoarding points -- collecting them without spending them on Topoi -- would be possible but pointless; they're not good for anything but spending on Topoi.  You can sit around and jack off looking at your gigantic point total if you like I guess.... and in the process of building that total up you'll have done lots of things that a lot of other players wanted you to do, so you *will* be contributing to the game.

If you don't give other people a chance to visit your Topoi, that's OK -- nobody is *restricted* by having a lack of Points, in any way save perhaps ability to make an Avatar.  Topoi are entirely optional, and if people want to tell separate stories, well, there's nothing to stop them.  But without Topoi, there's also nothing to stop someone from coming in and walking all over your story -- no motivation for them to play the game the way you want it played.

[Mike Holmes]

All excellent points. I still maintain that by charging at least one Point per paragraph posted, that you'll help to keep the economy under control, and inform the players that they need to interact. Small change, easy to track, and big results. IMO.

Your point about the inflation is well taken, however. In fact the larger expenditures could mirror and highlight the growing tension. Perhaps you could have some pacing mechanic where the first player to offer some amount for a Topoi would trigger some endgame.

Mike

[ejh]

Replying to Bill:

I like the general idea of this game, and the implementation in both the revised and previous version; I agree that trying to keep the structure of the rules simple is a good guiding principle.

Thanks very much!  You're kinder than I am for liking the previous version. :)

I was interested in something that happened in the on-going game:  One player tried to establish a scene wherein transpired a clandestine meeting, but then the other players seemed to "dog-pile" on with stealthy observers, causing one player to have a character complain about the publicity!  Does that jibe with what you experienced?

Yep.  To be fair, at that point not everyone had a very solid grasp of the rules, even such as they were at the time.  Under the current rules, this'd be all Pat's darn fault for not throwing "secret/unobserved meeting with the Merchant in Motley" up there as a Topos for the duration of the meeting.  This would mean if other players wrote about the meeting at all, they'd have good reason to keep it secret so that they could get the points for it.

 

It's interesting to try to come up with cost structures that provide incentives for what you want to happen, and disincentives for what you don't--including topical "violations" by other players.  I came up with this:
 
-- You pay to write; maybe 1 pt per 100 words.
-- At the end of your turn, you identify topoi:
      -- new ones you've introduced (maybe up to 3)
      -- established ones you've visited (any number).
      -- emergent ones (i.e., ones that you've seen in other players' turns, but you're articulating it for the first time and visiting it in your post).
 
You get 0 points for introducing new topoi.  The player who introduced an established topos you've visited gets 2 pts (if you introduced it, you only get 1 pt).  You get 1 pt for articulating and visiting an emergent topos, and so does the player in whose turn you "saw" the unarticulated topos.  Once you've articulated it, any time it gets visited, both you and the other player get 1 pt each.  You can't articulate an emergent topos from one of your own previous turns.
 
After your turn, another player can claim "damages" for topical violations:  you give 2 points to any player who can identify a topos they established that your turn violates.  Note that this is the only zero-sum point transfer; in all other cases, points are created out of thin air.
 
This pays less attention to issues of game balance than to trying to make it so that there are incentives to "read into" what other players write, and thus to collaborate more closely.  What do you think?

While these ideas seem well thought out, I am very resistant to changing the following facts about the current rules --

Points are good for nothing except rewarding other players for doing what you want with the story. (with Avatars being a minor semi-exception)

Points are earned only by doing what other players want you to do in the story.

There are no punishments, only rewards.
[/list:u]

I'm not interested in changing those things if I can possibly help it.

One player (Lxndr) proposed to me that there should be Anti-Topoi -- topoi which describe what shouldn't happen, and cause penalties.  I don't want to go that direction either, for the same reasons.  (Also, ask Mike how much fun negative Tenets are in a Uni game!)

[ejh]

Mike and Bill -- I'll keep the "point per paragraph" thing on the back burner.  Of everything that's been proposed it seems like the easiest thing to throw into the game without breaking what I've got established right now. :)

[efindel]

A couple of thoughts:

#1 - The dogpile on the "secret meeting" was bad, but I don't see how the current rules could be used to prevent it... you get points for visiting a Topos, but there's no penalty for violating one.  If I established a Topos that there's a secret meeting, then how would other people "visit" it?  Having everyone put in "so-and-so does not notice the secret meeting" seems just as bad to me from a standpoint of story flow as having them all notice it.

#2 - I'm not sure if this is a rules problem or a problem with getting used to a new set of rules, but it seems we have at least one Topos which can't be visited: how can anyone visit the "Soren is aloof and often amused" Topos, since no one else is allowed to state anything about Soren's emotional state?  I personally set up my Topos for Calbert as "Calbert is known for his cruelty" -- that way, people can relate things they've heard about Calbert to visit the Topos, or make comments about him.  They don't have to force an action or emotion on Calbert to visit it.

#3 - Considering that Topos is meant for pbem or pbp play, I'd like to suggest that paragraphs don't necessarily have to be added "at the end".  For example, I know I'd like to be able to go back and add paragraphs about the meeting on the balcony back where that meeting is, instead of having to keep returning to it when there may be two or three folks covering other scenes interspersed between.

In our current format, we might not want to do that, because it would make it harder to find the new stuff... but in an email game, where players would likely be quoting a paragraph they're responding to, or in a pbp game, where different folders or topics might be set up for different scenes, it might work well.

--Travis

[ejh]

A couple of thoughts:

#1 - The dogpile on the "secret meeting" was bad, but I don't see how the current rules could be used to prevent it... you get points for visiting a Topos, but there's no penalty for violating one.  If I established a Topos that there's a secret meeting, then how would other people "visit" it?  Having everyone put in "so-and-so does not notice the secret meeting" seems just as bad to me from a standpoint of story flow as having them all notice it.

Other people can write about things that happen at the meeting, as long as they don't vilolate an Avatar's headspace.  That would be one way to visit it.

But you're right, there's no penalty for violating them, and the current rules could not be used to "prevent" the dogpile.

BTW, I don't think the dogpile was so terrible.  It was slightly silly, and it was annoying to the first few writers because they'd probably have liked a secret meeting to really be secret, but I'm not going to judge the worth of the rules based on whether they'd have prevented it.

#2 - I'm not sure if this is a rules problem or a problem with getting used to a new set of rules, but it seems we have at least one Topos which can't be visited: how can anyone visit the "Soren is aloof and often amused" Topos, since no one else is allowed to state anything about Soren's emotional state?  I personally set up my Topos for Calbert as "Calbert is known for his cruelty" -- that way, people can relate things they've heard about Calbert to visit the Topos, or make comments about him.  They don't have to force an action or emotion on Calbert to visit it.

Good point.  The "aloof and amused" Topos would only be useful if poor Soren got de-Avatarized and somebody else got to write for him.

#3 - Considering that Topos is meant for pbem or pbp play, I'd like to suggest that paragraphs don't necessarily have to be added "at the end".  For example, I know I'd like to be able to go back and add paragraphs about the meeting on the balcony back where that meeting is, instead of having to keep returning to it when there may be two or three folks covering other scenes interspersed between.

In our current format, we might not want to do that, because it would make it harder to find the new stuff... but in an email game, where players would likely be quoting a paragraph they're responding to, or in a pbp game, where different folders or topics might be set up for different scenes, it might work well.

--Travis

Quite reasonable.

[ejh]

In case anyone's curious, I just added a "Contradictions" section to the ruleset on the wiki.  I present one wussy way of handling contradictions, and one radical, true-to-the-soul-of-Topos method.

Obviously I prefer the second.  But I was afraid to post it alone for fear that the world would end or something.

http://www.lostremovethisthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/Topos

[Bill_White]

I think you have to go with the second method (competing versions vie for acceptance), because even if you think you're going with the first (contradictions are prohibited), you'll *still* be going with the second.

Think about it:  if you say, "contradictions are prohibited" what you're really doing is introducing a new game-mechanic whereby somebody can say in reference to somebody else's turn, "This contradicts what I've already written."  The player in question might say, "No it doesn't--both are possible."  In cases where there actually is ambiguity, how can you resolve the ambiguity other than by seeing what other people (players) think?  That is, by seeing what they do on subsequent turns?

And while some contradictions might be really apparent, in that everyone agrees that they're contradictions, many will be more subtle.  So I think you can only have a "no contradictions" rule if you've either got a moderator to decide what counts as a contradiction, or if you allow players to poll the group and see if _everyone_ (perhaps including the player who perhaps mistakenly made it) agrees that no reconciliation of competing truths is possible.  That seems more complicated than just saying, "Hey, you truths are just going to have to duke it out amongst yourselves."

Bill

[ejh]

Good points, Bill. That's kind of how I was thinking.

So far, BTW, it looks like far from point inflation, points seem to be a little scarce.

My idea was for there to be Topoi littering the ground, indicating the direction that things should go, but so far there are a couple of little ones by me that are general, and tons of Avatar-specific Topoi.  It's like Points are so scarce people don't want to blow them on anything but stuff for their Avatars.

And when everybody's Topoi are about their own Avatar's, and are fairly specific, it's not that easy to Visit them.

Maybe that'll change in a few turns, since topoi are "the gift that keeps on giving" -- put a Topos out there and people can drink from that spigot as long as you keep the water running.  So it's worth waiting to see if people amass decent sized point banks so that they can feel free handing out a lot of Topoi.

but right now, it seems like Topoi are too scarce.  If it stays this way for another day or two I want to make them cheaper.

[Bill_White]

Ed wrote:

...but right now, it seems like Topoi are too scarce. If it stays this way for another day or two I want to make them cheaper.

That was why I was thinking that the points should be paid for writing, and topoi should be able to be pulled out for free (perhaps with a numeric limit, though)--but you have raised a number of points that suggest there's a "learning curve" in the game:  people eventually figure out how to play.

Bill

[ejh]

Here's my summary of, and response to, some controversy on the indierpgs list...

OK, what's being questioned is whether Avatars are a good idea.

Reasons given:

1) Because Avatars' wills are off limits, it takes a long time to do things like dialogue with them.

2) You could accomplish the "get offa my brain" function with Punishing Topoi, which Lxndr is calling "anti-topoi" but which I will call "Topoi of Pain" to distinguish them from the already-in-the-rules negative Topoi.  Topoi which take points away from people who violate them.

3) Topoi of Pain could be custom-tailored to encourage certain kinds of behavior and discourage others, allowing people to let others do certain things but not others with their characters.

I'd like to address these:

1) This game is about bribery, not coercion.  Topoi of Pain violate that.  There is absolutely nothing you can accomplish with a Topos of Pain that you can't accomplish with a Negative Topos, except control the story without rewarding your fellow players for allowing you that control.  That's not the way it works.  If you want control over the story, you pay off the other players for that control.  If you're telling them things they can't do, you had better pay them off for toeing your line.  Being able to say "you can't do this, you get nada for obeying my command, but I can hurt you if you disobey it" is contrary to the whole spirit of the game.  Not to mention that since players get complete control over when Topoi have been successfully visited, a Topos of Pain is a License to Kill.  Either that or we'd have to institute a whole *new* set of rules to let other players decide whether enforcement of a Topos was appropriate or not!

2) This stuff about "but I want other people to make my avatars do things but within limits" stuff -- what that is saying to me is that *you don't really want an Avatar.*  You want an ordinary character with a bunch of Topoi hung onto it to tell people how to run it, or negative topoi hung onto it to tell people how not to run it.  If you want a character who is *yourself* within the game, like a PC in a traditional RPG, then make an Avatar.  If you just want a character who you have a lot of control over the style and destiny of, then just use Topoi.  Avatars *do* clash badly with the rest of the rules, but that's because they're there to do something very different from the rest of the rules -- to give you a "PC" in a world where everybody's a "GM" so to speak.

3) The "pacing" stuff is already fixed by the Timeout rule.  The meaning of the Timeout is that it's the period that everybody considers an acceptable maximum delay between events.  If you are finding it problematic, you need to lobby other players for a shorter Timeout.

What I *do* think needs to be changed/clarified is the question of giving up and taking back Avatar status for a character, so I'm gonna add some rules on that.  It seems people took Avatars because that was the thing to do and they don't always seem to really want that Avatar status, so I want to make it easy to flip off the avatar switch and let people cruise with the character.

[dunlaing]

Ed:

Is there a tenet-setting phase to Topos like in Universalis? If not, doesn't the first player to take a turn basically get to define the game that will be played?

For instance, if I get together with a bunch of people to play Topos and they all just saw the Matrix and are geeking out on wanting to play the Matrix Topos, but I go first and post:

"Legolas the Avenger pulls his bloodied arrow out of the skull of an orc. He smiles and muses that, while making his arrows unbreakable isn't the coolest thing he uses that dumb hobbit's ring for, it's certainly up there."

Well, then I've done a real good job of hijacking the whole game without any feedback from the other players, haven't I?