Of course you win, but at what cost?

[Adam Dray]

I don't understand why you'd want the players to make a sacrifice. The players want to have fun and want their characters to succeed (for their own definitions of "succeed," granted).

Really, I think it's sufficient to find a way to make characters sacrifice something, paying the player back with some kind of reward, driving the story forward. The players wink and nod at the terrible sacrifice their characters have made, and years later they recount the tale to perfect strangers in con registration lines.

[clehrich]

I'm a little lost here.  Let's suppose, as an example, that we're talking about a basically Narrativist game, and that the Premise is something along the lines of, "What will you give up for power?"  Clearly the characters are going to drift, morally speaking; that's the whole point.

Now you are playing along, and you come to a situation in which it appears that the whole city is going to be eaten by some colossal demon or something, and the only thing to stop it is a PC who's made a deal with that very demon some time ago.  The choice is clear:

A. Give up all humanity and let it eat Manhattan; you will become the ruler of the new Demon Kingdom of North America.

B. Save Manhattan, but die horribly and be tortured for all eternity.

With this setup, surely it's generally cooler and more intense to make choice B?

If the stakes are much lower, as in

A. Let the demon eat that annoying guy who flipped you off, and get some extra power;
B. Refuse to let it, and have the demon start getting really pissy and dangerous

then there's a lot more chance that the choice will be A, right?

In a pure Sim game, it depends what we're exploring.

In a Gamist game, it depends on what the victory conditions are.

If you want cool sacrifices, you have to make it worthwhile to the players to have the characters make sacrifices.  The characters don't make them; they're fictional beings.  So how do you reward the player?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but aren't we going back over the oldest GNS ground, very very slowly?  I really think that if we put this into the context of GNS, much of it becomes rather obvious.

[LordSmerf]

I keep bumping into problems with the GNS outlook.  Maybe because it seems to be applied in a mutually exclusive way.  Why can't you have a Narrative and Simulationist system?  Why can't players play for both reasons within a single game?

Let's try it this way using the Manhattan being eaten by a demon example.  Here's the background.  You as a player have a goal for your character, that goal is to become a demon of incredible authority.  At this stage in the Narration the character is only to the point of wishing to rule North America.  Your two choices are:

A. Let the demon eat Manhattan, which allows the character to rule North America and makes him a buddy of the demon in question which furthers the player goal of becoming a powerful demon.

B. Stop the demon.  This will cost your character his chance at power inot his life and ticks of a powerful demon so that even if you survive you only make it harder to accomplish the player goal.

Does that make sense?  Even in a mostly narrativist game, there is some carry over of the Player's desire for the character.  I think that ideally you get things set up so that the Player cares about the World and it's fictional people such that he is willing to sacrifice his Second Level goals in order to save it.

Let's try modifying the example, in choice A everything is the same, but in choice B the character could easily stop the Demon without getting hurt and could still rule North America.  However, stopping the demon would put a real damper on the Second Level goal of becoming a powerful demon.  Is the sacrifice made or not?

Thomas

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, basically what Smerf seems to want is Abashed Vanilla Narrativism if you will. That is, he wants the players to make certain sorts of Narrativist decisions without the system providing incentive to do so.

What he's said is that he realizes that he's posed a contradiction. He wants a system that doesn't reward players for making these sorts of decisions, yet causes them to make these sorts of decisions. Which he understands, as does everyone else, is impossible.

What you can make is a system with no special mechanics (vanilla), that doesn't reward Narrativism (abashed), and hope that players make "the right decision"  when it comes to situations where you might be able to make a sacrifice.

Um, Over the Edge is a good example.

Mike

[Matt Wilson]

Yeah, basically what Smerf seems to want is Abashed Vanilla Narrativism if you will. That is, he wants the players to make certain sorts of Narrativist decisions without the system providing incentive to do so.

So getting back to my original question, are there systems that do provide incentive, Mike, that you can think of?

[LordSmerf]

So getting back to my original question, are there systems that do provide incentive, Mike, that you can think of?

To the best of my knowledge The Riddle of Steel has one of the better "reduce the penalty" systems for sacrifice.  The more experienced a character is when he dies, the more experience the next character a player creates within the campaign will have.  A couple of other ideas were mentioned in the thread (Multiverser for example).

I guess that if i really wanted to encourage sacrifice and decided to use a system for it, i would use a "reduce the penalty" as opposed to a "provide a reward."  I especially like Riddle of Steel's system since it may help to ease players who are primarily of a Gamist to be willing to lose a character since their next character will be more powerful than would be otherwise the case.

I do believe that it might be possible to encourage Player and Character sacrifice without system incentives, but it would have to be done at the World level.  The game's World would have to be so engrossing that you are willing to give things up to keep it on track.  This will rarely happen outside of a group that is using a World of their own manufacture.  I guess we all long for things that we just can't have...

Oh, and sorry for taking this thread so far off course.

Thomas

[Mike Holmes]

So getting back to my original question, are there systems that do provide incentive, Mike, that you can think of?

In terms of one that rewards the player to make a sacrifice? Not that I can think of off the top (narratvist systems are rare overall), but it's a trivial matter to make one. The simplest would be the classic point reward system. That is, you get more, I dunno, Plot Points, or something from the GM when he thinks the character has made a suitable sacrifice.

More mechanically, one could have a system like Hero Wars, where you can enumerate anything, and then you could do something like trade in stuff. For example to modify HW specifically, one could trade in an Ability and get some reward like Hero Points. To make it profitable, the resulting number of Hero Points in reward would have to equal the value of the original Ability (or maybe how many it cost him in the first place).

So, for example, Broggra the Warrior has Spear of Lombos at 17w, but it only cost him one HP to cement the item and get the power. So, he burns the spear in a ritual to bring back some guy he accidentially killed from the dead. So, Brogga gets the one HP that he spent for it back, and one more for a reward. These he might spend on creating a Relationship with the guy he killed or something.

Sound's very cool to me. You basically get points for dramatically changing your character via sacrifice. Neat.

Mike

[Matt Wilson]

To the best of my knowledge The Riddle of Steel has one of the better "reduce the penalty" systems for sacrifice.  The more experienced a character is when he dies, the more experience the next character a player creates within the campaign will have.

The thing about that that doesn't quite do what I want, is that it doesn't help the character in the moment. That rule doesn't help "win the day."

Maybe to clarify what I'm looking for, here's what I've come up with as a possible mechanic for PTA:

Characters have various resources that they can spend during a game to get bonuses, and they refresh every game session.

In a desperate moment, a player can choose to "burn" one of those resources to get a super extra bonus, but then that resource is lost.

So let's say that you have "Chuck" as a resource, and Chuck provides a bonus to negotiations. But you have to cut a really important deal with a dangerous person, so you "burn" Chuck, to make sure the deal happens. As a consequence, you lose Chuck's help in the future. Maybe the story is that you had to screw him over to make the deal work, or you stole money from him, or something.

Or suppose your character has a kickass car, and in a chase, in order to catch the bad guy, you "burn" the car by crashing it into the escaping bad guy's limousine.

The character wins the day, but it kind of sucked, because your character really liked that car, or maybe Chuck was a good and loyal friend.

Does that make sense? There's a pro and con to that sacrifice.

[Mike Holmes]

That's what I'm trying to get at with my example, Matt. Precisely.

As far as death is concerned, consider it from the HW POV again. To extend it, if you sacrifice your character, you would get all his hero points back, and get to create a new character with all those points. Ron mentioned something to me the othe day that makes me think that he's already thinking in these terms.

Basically you're dissociating the points from the character entirely, and making them player property. They're merely "invested" in the game. When the character loses something, or dies, the player loses their interface with the game, and gets his points back.

In Universalis, this dissociation is explicit. The main difference here being that there are no rules for "cashing in" a character or anything else. Interestingly, there were such rules in one of the playtest versions, but they never made it all the way to the final result. I'm starting to think that we really missed the boat on that one.

Mike

[Bob McNamee]

It seems to me that Ron mentioned a game (Violence Future?) where a character has an Endgame phase.

During this  the character becomes quite powerful, while heading to death. This allows achieving really important goals, so important that dying is worth it for the Player/character.

[LordSmerf]

Matt, i see what you're saying.  Unfortunately the types of sacrifices you are talking about are a little hard to predict.  I mean you must actively choose to crash your car into the limo.  There's no way to give you a generic bonus for sacrificing the car that makes sense, so you can't get some sort of better chance in terms of rolling.  So once again we're brought to the idea that the sacrifice can not be covered by the system.  We can however make the thing sacrifice important.  When driving this car you get bonus of X, if you lose the car you don't get the bonus.  But this isn't a systemic solution.  Though i do think that mike has a good point about resource investment, it doesn't seem to be covering what you're talking about.  From what i understand you're looking for some system that allows the sacrificing of a Numbers bonus in order to progress the Narrative.  I'm giving up the negotiation bonus provided by Chuck in order to further the story.

Unfortunately, i can't think of a system, or even a way to develop one, that integrates that well.  If you steal money from Chuck then the deal is guaranteed to succedd (for example) so it's not like your getting a Numbers bonus here.  The "burning" of resources is a good idea, but i can't see a good way to integrate the Numbers side with the Narrativist side.

Wow.  That wasn't even remotely helpful was it?  I just keep restating ignorance...

Thomas

[Matt Wilson]

Matt, i see what you're saying.  Unfortunately the types of sacrifices you are talking about are a little hard to predict.  I mean you must actively choose to crash your car into the limo.  There's no way to give you a generic bonus for sacrificing the car that makes sense, so you can't get some sort of better chance in terms of rolling.  So once again we're brought to the idea that the sacrifice can not be covered by the system.  

Hey Thomas:

I'm going to disagree with you there, quite strongly. I think you can provide a generic bonus, if the system also allows interpretive narration of success, and no strict limits on "rounds" and things of that nature. If you roll, and the points aren't there, you can choose to burn the resource, and you succeed. It's up to you to explain why the burn helps you succeed, but hey, that's the fun of good ol' storytellin'.

[Paul Czege]

In terms of one that rewards the player to make a sacrifice?

In EPICS, a player character starts out sketchy, and gets defined through assertions the player makes during play. The GM manages the "deserve to survive" mechanics, allocating Survival Points to players for their decisions. So, for instance, when the last jet engine fails and the GM turns to a player and asks if the character has any situationally relevant skills, an answer of "Lieutenant Steve has never had pilot training" is worth more Survival Points.

Paul

[LordSmerf]

Hey Thomas:

I'm going to disagree with you there, quite strongly. I think you can provide a generic bonus, if the system also allows interpretive narration of success, and no strict limits on "rounds" and things of that nature. If you roll, and the points aren't there, you can choose to burn the resource, and you succeed. It's up to you to explain why the burn helps you succeed, but hey, that's the fun of good ol' storytellin'.

In this case who determines if the explaination is appropriate?  You're right that it can be done, and i always appreciate when people point out when i'm letting hyperbole get the best of me.  Anyway, i've found that usually the groups that can come up with decent explainations would be able to do the same thing without a written mechanic.  They would choose to sacrifice Chuck and trust in the GM to give them some appropriate bonus.  Maybe i just don't have enough faith in people's ability to do things.  Like so many other things, anything i say here could be wrong since i've never seen it in action.  In fact you may be right that this will fascilitate what you're talking about, but my first reaction is to say "no" and then stick my fingers in my ears while you respond.  Sorry about that, i'm going to step back and give some serious consideration to the idea before i say anything more.

Thomas

[Jeffrey Miller]

Anyway, i've found that usually the groups that can come up with decent explainations would be able to do the same thing without a written mechanic.

The thing is though, system matters.  The group may try to do some set of actions considered "correct" for the theme and spirit of the game as a larger whole, but if they're at odds with the system, or if the system does encourage, reward, and validate the desired player behavior, why not?

-j-