Game concept that lacks a vital mechanic

[Emmett]

I have a concept that follows traditional mechanics (combat movement etc) except for one vital aspect of the game, the part that makes it interesting as a game. In my attempts to formulate a structure to this I found that I could write a whole book to explain mechanics that I want to be Intuitive.

The game world is a single planet, it probably would end up being Earth or some form of Earth to simplify things. Things are ho-hum boring except for one thing. A second moon has appeared in the night sky, and since its arrival whatever you think comes true!

Now it's not as childish as that, I have to introduce the concept without writing a book here.

The gross level mechanics that I have worked out says this. Since what everybody is thinking comes true, reality is for the most part maintained since I do not expect you to be able to fly, shoot laser beams out of your eyes etc. So in effect only if you can convince the majority of people, do you get an effect.

This basically makes the bogeyman and interesting thought since most people have some built in fear of the dark/unknown. This isn't limited to the bogeyman either though.

If you are able to convince people incrementally you can gradually make them believe things that they normally wouldn't. For example, I might be able to force myself to believe that I will hover for a moment at the peak of my jump, since it is only a momentary thing, the disbelief raised by others is less. Once they see me hover for a moment, I must then convince myself that I can now fly. Because I have already demonstrated that I can hover, people around me are less resistant to the thought I can fly.

There are a number of other factors. Population centers would see the least disruption, while remote areas would give an individual more freedom (someone has to be at least aware of your presence to negatively impact you). You must be able to truly convince yourself that you can do what you want to do. Because of this, some people are better at controlling this phenomenon better than others. This also makes the insane very dangerous since they are very convinced of delusions (There's bacteria everywhere!). It also makes a charlatan a really interesting character.

Animals are also effected by this, but because they are driven by instinct, they tend to be more effective hunters, (more deadly, stronger etc.) or larger and more imposing, especially in the wild.

So now that I got a gist of what I'm thinking of out. What I'm having trouble with is finding an elegant way of putting it to a ruleset.

I don't like the standard magic points idea because it doesn't really fit the cause/effect. I could make a psyche/willpower vs. a difficulty number that varies with environment but I think that's kludgy. I don't really like a mechanicless system because it then makes everything possible and the Game Master has to argue why the player can't.

I've been thinking of a mechanic that forces the player to justify why they can. Basically your chance of success is zero unless you can say "I'm in a rural aria +5, I am in a dark room +1, the effect is small +1" or something to that effect. The actual numbers would have to be adjusted to make the game fun but not let the players go hog wild.

I really like the story idea, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to make it work. Any ideas?[/i]

[taalyn]

What about using some sort of Resource? Say Belief points. The more belief you've invested in something, the easier it will be to do. At the same time, in a crowd, those people have belief points working against you.

Do you have a standard mechanic in place, or is the whole matter still up for debate? If it's open, I prefer something a la Donjon - a single score (belief 6) providing dice for a pool. If I really believe something, I might devote all my dice to the attempt.

On the other hand, you're still down to explaining why you believe it or not. This reminds me of one of the major problems with illusions in certain games - you have to come up with reasons to disbelieve, which may not work. If I have a good reason to believe that the wall isn't there (because it's made of Cotton Candy, say), then that's enough to disbelieve, unless, and ONLY unless, it's actually real.

So it seems to me that you are trying to systematize something that is inherently unsystematizable. Everything will be a judgement call, and open to LOTS of debate between the players and the GM.

Aidan

[Emmett]

Sadly I do agree, I'm trying to regulate chaos. Its just that the idea is so apealing to me I don't like letting it go. The mechanic is up in the air, but I think I would like to use some kind of a tension system. Basically there is a pulling from the character other characters can pull with or against and the world has a kind of variable inerta.

What gets hard again is say you have a good sucess/fail system, then you have to have a way of regulating that success.

"I made my roll! I'm going to create a seven headed dragon and have it breath fire on my enemies!"

Its too big an effect for one but how do you generate the stats for the seven headed dragon?

It's a big question I know, but your big people!

[taalyn]

The only mechanic I can think that would work would be a Narrative system like Universalis, maybe. Then any given effect would be the result of accord between all the players, and managing effects wouldn't be such an issue.

That's my $0.05 (adjusting for inflation),

Aidan

[Emmett]

It does tend to lend itself to a narritive or a formless system, but I'm old fasioned. I like a mechanic that gives structure.

I also want to develop some kind of structure to make it not so easy to do whatever the player feels like but still possible with a lot of effort.

I guess I don't really get narritive systems, If I wanted to write a novel, I would write one. I like playing games and I like games that I roll dice. Notice that I keep saying I. I'm not inviting a flame here, thats just my personal thoughts on the matter. As I've stated before, I'm stubborn and I like things the way I like things.

So basically I don't want to give up on the idea and I don't want to do a narritive. I like dice, I like rules.

I was kicking this around in my sleep and got an idea. What about a dice pool that has a basic difficulty (nothing new there I know). Players would be able to add their pools together or subtract from other character's pools any number of dice from your dice pool to negate effects, but that also leaves you with less to be effective with. (I like the idea of negating dice instead of numbers) You would have to roll over a basic difficulty level to get an effect of course. But your resulting roll would be able to generate an effect that falls into a specific group of catigories. The number you rolled would tell you what you could do inside that catagory.

For example, one catagory could be monster generation. Maybe you could generate a dragon, but it would only be as powerful as your roll. The monster would be etherial unless you had enough point to fill in all it's attributes.

Then there could be a movement catigory, and an attack catagory etc.

[taalyn]

Well, maybe you can make Belief a resource. Building on what you have mentioned, and with nods to Donjon, why don't you have a Belief pool. Describe how dice get added in, others can use their pool to oppose/disbelieve. Successes add back to the pool, which provides basic details for effects.

Example:

I have Belief 8, Joanna the Disbeliever has Belief 5.

I want to float. I do the incremental thing, using 5 dice, explaining all along how each die is appropriate. Joanna disbelieves with 3, also explaining why it won't work. We roll:

I roll my 5, get 3,4,7,9,9.
Joanna gets 1,3,3,7.

I get 2 successes, combined with the rest of my pool (3) to provide 5 dice worth of effects. Floating is a die per 100 lbs, say, so there's 2 dice. Stabilizing is another die, and lasting for 10 minutes is another. I've got 1 die left, which I'll save for later.

Next time I try something, it's the same deal - split up Belief pool between how much I believe in what I'm doing and how much it has to do. Unless you're pretty awesome, you can believe a lot but not succeed excellently, or do exactly what you want but at a price (say a wound/fatigue per die added?). All you have to do is define die costs for various effects.

An idea, that actually occurred to me the other day, but I wanted to see what system you had in place. It looks like you don't, so this could work...

Aidan

[Jack Spencer Jr]

What you need is a Lumpley Principle, a method to develop consensus among the player what happens in the shared imagined space. You can worry about the logistic of why it works later so long as the system works

[Jack Spencer Jr]

This is based a little bit on Aidan's idea, but simplified, I hope.

You have a belief stat which gives you a pool of dice. Rolling dice against another pool, more or less like Aidan describes. But instead of creating X number of pounds of matter, on a success, it remains as long as the belief roll is a success.

Example:

I have belief of 5. I try to make a fire breathing dragon appear. It's a roll against the belief the GM determines is 5, for some reason. I'll use d6's here for example purposes

Me:    2, 3, 4, 6, 6
them: 1, 2, 3, 3, 4

This would be two sucesses. The dragon appears, breathing fire, eating cows, destroying buildings and everything and has a belief score of 2 since that's what my success score was. A test against this belief score will make the dragon suddenly disappear. Poof.

I think there's some ideas here. The basic idea is that stuff happens based on the belief of the characters. It gives them the "push" to make things happen.

[szilard]

Well, since it doesn't look like it has been said before, but this looks a lot like Mage with its emphasis on magic being limited by the consensus.

...so let's look at what they do in that game. First, magic is more difficult
1) if it is obvious (vulgar) magic, rather than inobvious and easily explained (coincidental) magic
and
2) if it is in front of people who are not aware of magic in general

There is also paradox (which is, essentially, backlash from the consensus), but that doesn't seem terribly relevant... (or does it?)

So, anyway, what I would suggest is incorporating something along the lines of (1) and (2) above, taking the important considerations from them. There are a few ways of doing this. Here is what I'd suggest:

1) Each miraculous feat should have a probability rating demonstrating how likely it is. The less probable it is, the more difficult it will be to pull off.

2) When attempting a feat, an audience rating should be determined based upon who is an observer of the feat (the more people, the more difficult ), how good the observing conditions are (the better, the more difficult ), and how open they are to the possibility of the miraculous (the less open, the more difficult ).

Difficulties can be assessed by subtracting dice or whatever is appropriate to your system.

Stuart

[Jeffrey Miller]

Although not directly related to building a mechanic, how familiar are you with Celtic Druidic word-magic?  Much of the pre-Romantics magic is based on the idea that the better poet can create a desired reality;  Amergin the great Bard-Mage sung in a contest with the Tuatha De Danaan -- they trade magic poems until Amergin sings the better song about why he and his people own Ireland, and the power of the words creates a shared belief so powerful that even the Tuatha De Danaanhave to admit that it is indeed true.

http://www.angelfire.com/de2/newconcepts/wicca/amergin.html

Another good example of word-magic swaying belief and thus reality lies in the myth-cycle of Cuchullain, who's gaes'd to never harm a hound.  At some point, he kills an otter, whose name in Irish contains a root syllable meaning "dog" or "water fox" -- at which point the results of his breaching the gaes are brought down upon him.

-jeffrey "ah, the benefits of a Liberal Arts degree" miller-

[clehrich]

Couple of thoughts.

1. Sources.  
C.S. Friedman wrote a rather tedious set of novels (When True Night Falls) that did something not unlike what you've got here.  The series Mythago Wood, by I forget who, is a much better take on it.  Read Mage, as suggested, very very carefully.

2. Mechanics.
Dice pools work nicely for this sort of effect, because the players have considerable flexibility in pushing things, but the more they push the more they in some sense spend or gamble.

Now you need a big ugly list of kinds of stuff you can do with magic.  Really sit down and work out what the biggest damn pool anybody's ever likely to have will look like, add 2 (they'll find a way), and imagine that every die succeeds.  Scale that to the biggest effect you hope never to see in the game.  Then start putting in stuff you do want to see, and scale scale scale.  Make a table of these things, ranked by number, so that the GM and players can look at it and think, "Okay, this thing I want to do is like X, so it costs 5 base."  The GM says, "No, 6, 'cause it's more like Y," and so forth.  This is very tedious, but there's no way out that I know of if you want to mechanize the process.

Now, as suggested before, you need a list of modifiers.  Here's some ideas that seem to me fit pretty well with your background:

A. Audience (as suggested; see Mage)

B. Skill: I recommend there be some variation here.  Perhaps the skill is really visualization, as in seeing what's going to happen as though it were real?

C. Sacrifice (see Friedman): the idea is that the more important and valuable stuff the character destroys in the process, the more power he gets.  I like this idea if the mechanic of the dice pool involves similar gambling, because it has the player doing what the character is doing.  A really powerful sorcerer who kills himself and everyone he loves in some really agonizing vicious way in order to produce an effect can pretty much do anything; a weak sorcerer who agrees not to drink for the next 10 minutes gets no modifier at all.

D. Location (see Ars Magica and Mythago Wood): the more magical resonance has built up in an area, for whatever reason, the easier it is to believe that way-out stuff is going to happen anyway.  In the darkest of night, with no moon, deep in a disturbingly creepy forest, magic is a walk in the park.

Just scale the modifiers so that they're incremental by dice (daylight 0 --> true night 5, etc.).

Unfortunately, everything is really going to rest on interpreting that list.  I don't see any way around that, I'm afraid.

[taalyn]

Robert Holdstock wrote Mythago Wood. An excellent tale, and so are his other works.

The words as truth idea is very ancient. Besides the Celtic bits cited, look also to Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindu...just about every single culture on the planet.

Aidan

[Tony Irwin]

I've been thinking of a mechanic that forces the player to justify why they can. Basically your chance of success is zero unless you can say "I'm in a rural aria +5, I am in a dark room +1, the effect is small +1" or something to that effect. The actual numbers would have to be adjusted to make the game fun but not let the players go hog wild.

I really like the story idea, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to make it work. Any ideas?[/i]

Here's a different approach from some of the other (great) ideas that have been thrown out. In your mechanic the presence of NPCs in a scene would obviously affect the players' abilties. Why not anchor the mechanic in that idea, different NPC personalities will be the main detrimental effect (or positive influence) on the players' abilities.

If all the numbers are attatched to the NPCs then it means you get to hide all the mechanics of it from the PCs. If you're going for a sim game that could be great - the player announces the intended effect then you do the calc to see what happens. Players get to enjoy a reality that seems to have a mind of its own, something that can be influenced but they can never quite be sure to what extent.

Players will begin to figure out "My stuff always works when that NPC guy is about, let's stick around him for this session", or "That guy in the suit seems to screw up my abilities, avoid at all costs". Players will begin to tie themselves into your world and the characters you create. So anyway I think an interesting take might be to take all the modifiers and stuff and place them in the NPCs. Let them be the ones with belief pools and stuff.

Looks great, looking forward to seeing more.

Tony

[Mike Holmes]

Some of the systems presented above look like they might work in general terms. But it sounds to me like what's missing is the investment portion of belief. That is, in the examples, you ramp up to new abilities over time. So what I see is success on previous attempts rolling over somehow into future attempts. So as you try harder nad harder to believe stuff, your previous successes aid you. Fail once, and the bonus drops, and you're back to doing the last step on the ladder.

So, as a (probably bad) example of an ubersystems for this, you could use something like the Hero System, and base the difficulty of attampting anything on how many points the power costs to build. Then, if you roll your "belief" roll, successfully, you gain a bonus that would make doing it again fairly easy, and will allow you to do anything that the previous attempt might imply with that same bonus.

Specific example: start with a one-hex image of you radiating heat. The small cost gives you a -1 to the roll, but you make it by 3 anyhow. So next you roll those three points over to a roll to do a change environment in a two hex radius to make the temperature actually rise. This costs a little more, so there's a larger penalty, but you have the +3 bonus to cancel it. WIth the successes for that, you can move on to a small heat based damage shield or something representing the temp gatting high enough to hurt those who touch the character. Etc.

Is that what you're looking for?

Mike

[Shreyas Sampat]

I think that unless you're making the deliberate design decision to avoid metagame mechanics, then your best bet is to openly metagame with this.  Use RetCon shamelessly; let players decide "this is how much I want this effect to work", spend some metagame resource on it, and then make them justify their decision on how probable their effect is.  You could even incorporate Mike's rolling-over thing; have success on one effect be a "free" factor in the favor of the next, costing no Resource but still requiring justification.