Legacy of the Ages: GM dice

[Tony Irwin]

Folks I'm having a bit of a problem thinking about conflicts in Legacy of the Ages, and how many dice the GM should be bringing to the table. The problem is that there isn't a GM! "Normal GM responsibilities" are rotated around the table.

I've been looking at how other games handle "How big should the opposition be" questions. Robin Law's Dying Earth RPG has a bestiary where some scores for NPCs are caluculated as being 0.5 x the party average, or 2 x the party average. That seems very smart to me.

Ron Edward's Trollbabe has all rolls unopposed so the GM never has to calculate NPC stats, just provide NPCs the players will be committed to interacting with in dice conflicts. Again that seems really smart and makes me look at what I've done and think hmmmm... I should be trying harder.

My conflict system is heavily influenced by Paladin and the Pool, but even more so by Universalis as its about allowing players to vie for levels of input into the conflict outcome, so conflict is always about "Who narrates?". Typically each player in the conflict will be rolling 3 dice, looking for successes, and deciding whether to activate traits for rerolls.

Originally I had decided to scale the powers of the rotating GM throughout the game. So the first time round the GMs can use 2 dice to protect their right to narrate in their scene. By the time everyone is framing their 4rth scene they can roll 4 dice for NPCs and so on. I thought it might give an "epic" feel (I'm going for a The Hobbit/LotR type game) to scale things up like this.

The link to the PDF is in my signature at the bottom of this post (conflict resolution is on pages 2 through 5) but what I'm really interested in is this...

How does your game (or other games you've played) deal with establishing power levels of NPCs?

In any game you've considered writing (or know of) where GM responsibilities rotate, what were your thoughts about balancing the GM's powers with respect to the players (esp in regard to NPCs that get involved in conflicts)?

(I should maybe point out this is especially in regard to systems where the conflict is used to answer "Who narrates?" rather than "What happens?")

I'd be very grateful for even general musings or "you should check out..." kind of replies.

Many thanks folks,

[Mike Holmes]

OK, I've not read the game too closely yet. But what would happen if the rule hypothetically were that the player who's character is in the conflict just got to decide what the difficulty was in terms of opponent ability, etc?

Mike

[ADGBoss]

I like the way you laid out the rules btw.

I was thinking that at the beginning ove every sessionm OR perhaps at the creation of a new story Arc, that there be created an Opposition Dice Pool or Opposition Successes.  I am not sure mechanically exactly how to arrange it but this Pool of Dice or Successes can be drawn upon when NPC conflicts arise.

per example:
1)The group has decided that the city guards have 3 dice or 3 successes for the conflict and if the losing player's successes are less then the Opposition, he or she has succumbed to the Opposition in some way...

or

2) NPCs are phantom players and are also rolled (perhaps in a rotating order of players) and if the NPC's are the winners, the entire group of players invlved is Stonewalled in some way and this is narrated either by the loser or winner, narrating how each player is affected by the stonewall. Discussion with each player can result in proper results.  The winner (or highest rolling character) would have minimal effects where the player who beat out the Loser might have a stonewall effect nearly as bad as the Loser.

Just a couple of ideas that popped into mind while reading the rules.

on a side personal note: I just want to say Tony, I hate you (big smiley face here :) ) because until now I had been hard core MUST HAVE GM. Now there is a little voice in my head saying "You know, games COULD work without a GM....." and more ideas are swirling around the already crowded imagination....


Sean
ADGBoss

[Tony Irwin]

OK, I've not read the game too closely yet. But what would happen if the rule hypothetically were that the player who's character is in the conflict just got to decide what the difficulty was in terms of opponent ability, etc?

Mike

Well, the problem I'm having is that conflicts are always about deciding who decides the outcome, rather than what the outcome is.

So I guess the GM dice aren't really so much about opponent ability/situation difficulty, as about the GM's ability to preserve his own intentions for this part of the story.

Obviously I would normally say that the GM should be encouraging players to take control (ala the Pool, giving out GM dice) but because its a rotating GM we use the GM role as an opportunity to set up situations we want to see our characters in.

So really I guess its more like Universalis than the Pool. I want the GM to be able to preserve their intentions for the scene but I also want the players to be able to challenge that and replace it with their own outcomes.

[Tony Irwin]

I like the way you laid out the rules btw.

Cheers :-) I'm sure I had an AD&D edition that was laid out with 3 columns per page but when I went looking for it to confirm, it was no where to be found.

I was thinking that at the beginning ove every sessionm OR perhaps at the creation of a new story Arc, that there be created an Opposition Dice Pool or Opposition Successes.  I am not sure mechanically exactly how to arrange it but this Pool of Dice or Successes can be drawn upon when NPC conflicts arise.

Yeah I like that. The Acting Player (GM) in the conflict needs to be able to preserve their right to narrate the conflict outcome. I like the idea of just setting up a Success level rather than have the Acting Player rolling dice, as it keeps the spotlight on the players. A finite pool of opposition successes would be good because it means the player can vary the successes needed for any scene in accordance with how much they want the players to grab control of the story at this point.

example: Ok I'll be using 5 successes for this scene with Smaug. Its key to where I want things to go. (meaning that no-one is going to kill, con, sneak past, or seduce Smaug in this scene)

example: Ok Elrond rings the bell and the council begins. I'll only be using 1 success for conflicts in this scene (meaning that Elrond, and in fact all of Rivendell, is up for grabs for players to play their own characters off of.)

Something as simple as saying that the Acting player automatically gets 3 dice/successes for every conflict in their scene might be the way for me to go. But this can be reduced before the scene begins and the extra dice (or tokens/whatever) are placed somewhere on the character sheet. That way players can store up their own succeses for scenes that really matter to them.

on a side personal note: I just want to say Tony, I hate you (big smiley face here :) ) because until now I had been hard core MUST HAVE GM. Now there is a little voice in my head saying "You know, games COULD work without a GM....." and more ideas are swirling around the already crowded imagination....

Heh! Please get some of them posted on this board, so I can nick them immeadiately and incorporate them into my game. Without the aid of an overt currency (Universalis) Im finding it very hard to balance everything and see how things interact in a GMless game.

[Mike Holmes]

The Acting Player (GM) in the conflict needs to be able to preserve their right to narrate the conflict outcome. I like the idea of just setting up a Success level rather than have the Acting Player rolling dice, as it keeps the spotlight on the players. A finite pool of opposition successes would be good because it means the player can vary the successes needed for any scene in accordance with how much they want the players to grab control of the story at this point.

What's to stop a player from just hogging? If I'm GM, and want to stay that way, why shoudn't I just make every roll very difficult? What happens if the pool runs out?

There ought to be some expense to the player deciding to spend the dice, or there's no real reason to have them.

Mike

[Tony Irwin]

What's to stop a player from just hogging? If I'm GM, and want to stay that way, why shoudn't I just make every roll very difficult? What happens if the pool runs out?

There ought to be some expense to the player deciding to spend the dice, or there's no real reason to have them.

Mike

yeah thanks, you're right. Im toying with the idea of having an established number of GM successes in every scene. That way the GM can reduce the number for some scenes, saving them up to spend on later scenes. eg I'll make it easy for you to take control now, so that I can make it harder later on.

A PC gives a player 3d6 in a conflict, each 1 gives one success and each 2 gives two successes. So that averages (I think) 1.5 successes for three dice.

So if I say the GMing player always has 3 successes for conflicts in their scene, then that forces players to use their rerolls to hit that many successes, narrating the steps in how the conflict develops.

The GMing player can decide to use less than 3 successes for conflicts in their scene, saving up the difference for adding to any future scene. So every GMing player will be able to maintain some control over the direction of their scene, but they can vary it.

[Valamir]

What if every GM gets a GM opposition pool of dice when they first become GM.

For any conflict, the GM can choose to roll as many or as few of these dice as they want.

Any die that comes up a one* is permanently removed from the pool.

Thus the more dice you use to ensure control NOW the more you risk losing dice and control for the future.  

When the pool runs out of dice**, that's when the GM duty rotates and a new GM takes over with a new pool.

That sound interesting at all?


* or 1-2, or odd numbers, or whatever is necessary to achieve the pacing desired for GM rotation.

** also the GM can give up all dice in the pool for 1 final narration, and then cedes his GM mantle...this would be to avoid thrashing around with just 1 or 2 dice in the pool waiting for them to finally go away.  The GM could simply burn them and be done.

[Tony Irwin]

What if every GM gets a GM opposition pool of dice when they first become GM.

For any conflict, the GM can choose to roll as many or as few of these dice as they want.

Any die that comes up a one* is permanently removed from the pool.

Thus the more dice you use to ensure control NOW the more you risk losing dice and control for the future.  

Funnily enough - the way the conflict system stands, rolling a 6 removes that dice from your pool (Page 3). If a GM's dice pool was held over from conflict to conflict then that would encourage them to be wary about dedicating too many dice to their pool...

Hmmm... drawing the same number of successes in my system lets both players add fresh dice to their pool (Page 4, inspired by Uni's edge dice). That means the GM would be encouraged to match a player's number of dice in the hope of drawing and thus scoring extra dice for future conflicts.

That seems pretty solid. The GM scoring dice from draws will stop players initiating conflicts just to try and drain her dice pool. But Losing dice on 6s means that there is enough of a drain to encourage the GM to think about how many dice are really necessary. Better yet the GM will be less likely to use rerolls and risk more 6s - meaning reroll narration is done mainly by players about their PCs.

When the pool runs out of dice**, that's when the GM duty rotates and a new GM takes over with a new pool.

At the moment for GM transitions I'm using Scene Exits (Page 5, got the idea from Trollbabe and Theme-Chaser)...

Scene Exits
The scene can only end once a player addresses the “exit”. The exit can be a question, a task, an event, or outcome that the acting player wants to be addressed in the scene. This is a way of ensuring that even if the scene goes very different from what he had expected, the acting player’s wishes are still addressed.

Every scene has an exit. The Acting Player must establish what it is that this part of the story must deal with, before the characters can move onto a different scene. Once a player’s character has entered a scene, they may not leave it until the exit has been addressed.

eg The death of Smaug, Who is this Strider?, Out of the frying pan, Over Caradhras or through the Gap of Rohan?, Arwen & Aragorn, could all be exits. My intent for the game is to have the option of tightly focused scenes so I don't want to change that just yet.

sound interesting at all?

Yeah, it sounds very interesting, and it could fit very neatly with what I have already so it wouldn't add lots of new concepts to the conflict system.

I do have a concern though that a meta-system could become a game in itself. Maybe I could prevent that by saying that GM pools are reset for each scene. That way any ebb and flow, or build up, or diminishing returns effect is tied into a single scene rather than across the whole game. Which again encourages a focused "What do I want from this scene" approach.

If the chance 6s from rerolls (Page 4, narrating a trait to reroll like Paladin) really do provide a sufficient drain on the dice pool, then instead of having a store of dice and deciding how many to risk putting in the pool then I could just have the single pool with no store. The decision about risk comes from whether or not to reroll for a better result.

Well, best thing to do is for me to go home and roll buckets of dice and see how it works.

Many thanks!

[Palaskar]

How does your game (or other games you've played) deal with establishing power levels of NPCs?
-- Well, in my game Signature, each NPC's Signature trait (think Donjon's classes) is rated relative to the Signature Trait of the PC they are designed to compete against.

So on a villain team, you'd have a bunch rated:

Signature: PC Trait

For the "mooks", you'd have:

Signature: PC Trait-2

For the "Big Bad" (to borrow a Buffy term), you'd have:

Signature: EACH of each PC's highest Trait

this gives a Dr.Destroyer-like effect where you have a villain as strong as the partys "brick", as energized as the party's "blaster", and so on.

In any game you've considered writing (or know of) where GM responsibilities rotate, what were your thoughts about balancing the GM's powers with respect to the players (esp in regard to NPCs that get involved in conflicts)?

(I should maybe point out this is especially in regard to systems where the conflict is used to answer "Who narrates?" rather than "What happens?")
--I can only go back to classic round-robin storytelling.

The GM has GM powers (narration of setting, control of NPCs, etc.) for a given amount of time. Then, the next person becomes GM for the same amount of time.

This new GM may accept the old GM's narration as canon, or may change it, as he or she desires.

Keep in mind, of course, that the -next- GM can do the same thing, and so on.