Railroading With Dice, A Core Mechanic

[jburneko]

So, I'm looking over the RPG that I'm working on and while the actual document is not done I think I'd like some feedback on the idea behind the core mechanic.  I called this thread railroading with dice because the core mechanic takes a lot of decision making out of the player's hands.  The fun in some sense is not meant to come from making decisions but rather from using Author and Director Stance to narrate the outcomes of the dice.  In some sense the mechanic is a Simulationist one that uses Narrativist techniques.

This core mechanic is inspired by three things.  1) Story Engine.  2) Relationship Maps. 3) Several discussions here on the Forge about Zombie Movies.  The idea is that Night of the Living Dead is not about Zombies.  It's about a group of highly incompatable people trapped together under stress.  The 1980 remake of the film stresses this point when early on the lead woman says, "Look at them.  They're so slow.  With careful use of amunition we could just walk right past them to town."  Later on in the film she infact does do this ALL BY HERSELF.  The point of the film being, of course, that it's these people's inability to see past their own agendas, egos and fears that gets them killed, not the Zombies.

I have long since wanted to get this to happen in an RPG.  However, whenever I have laid such a scenario before players they instantly bond together and generally escape the scenario nearly unscathed and in half the expected playing time.  Games like All Flesh Must Be Eaten do an excelent job of creating mechanics that facilitate the physical action of these movies but totally fail to fascilitate the psychological aspect of these films.  Thus, I have created Isolation: The Roleplaying Game of Small Spaces and Personal Conflict.  The core mechanic is designed to encourage and in some cases MANDATE conflict, hence, railroading with dice.

This is a very BRIEF and abstract summary of the mechanic.  Character creation consists of picking a Profession, 3 positive traits, 3 negative traits, a Bias and a Goal.  After character creation a relationship map of sorts is constructed between all the PCs.  But instead of representing actual relationships the links represents lines of tension or comerardery.  For example if two people have incompatiable traits, such as Sarcastic and Slow-witted, this warents a red (negative) link between them.  If two people have compatable traits, such as Flirty and Handsome, this warents a green (positive) link between them.  It is expected that each player will have multiple links of various colors between each and every other PC.

Now the first rule, borrowing from Puppetland is, "What you say is what you do."  The players are not allowed to strategize or discuss a course of action with the other players.  They must simply state what they intended to do.  They are allowed to say anything they want that illuminates their character.  Make a speech, pick a fight, whatever.  However, if their action is some kind of conflict resolving action or "Die worthy" action such as, "I want to try and board up all the windows and doors" then they must simply state that that is what they are doing.  They can not first discuss the idea with the players.

Okay, once the action is stated the player may attempt to pursued other players to help him.  There is one die roll that is used both to determine the reactions of the other players AND the outcome of the conflict.  The dice are simply interpreted two ways.  At this point there is rather involved mechanic involving red and green dice based on the links in the relationship map.

There are however 3 possible outcomes on the first pass of interpretation.  Every player is either Hostile to the idea proposed by the player, Neutral to the idea proposed by the player, or Friendly to the idea proposed by the player.  Any player may voluntarily downgrade their result.  For example, if they roll Friendly they may choose to be Neutral.  However, they may not upgrade their result.

The second interpretation determins the outcome of the conflict.  Basically the proposing player contributes his positive green dice.  Friendly players contribute their green dice.  Neutral players contribute no dice and Hostile players contribute their negative red dice.  Red dice cancel green dice.

The result is then compared to some number of difficulty dice rolled by the GM.  The possible outcomes are taken from Story Engine.

Total Success
Basic Success
Partial Success
Partial Failure
Basic Failure
Total Failure

At this point the players are free to discuss the actual details and outcomes providing explinations for WHY their character was hostile/neutral/friendly and WHAT exactly they did that caused the aid or hinderance, etc.

Notes: A player may choose to act alone or only try to persued a subset of the players.  The incentive for trying to persuade as many players as possible is that the difficulty of a conflict is modified by the number of active players REGARDLESS of their participation in the scene.

There is also something called a Stress Level.  The Stress Level effects both the difficulty of a task and the likelyhood that players will get along.  

There are various rules for modifying the Stress Level and for changing the links in the relationship map, and gaining bonuses and penalties to the dice rolls but they are not imporant to the core mechanic.

So what do you think of the idea?

Jesse

[Jared A. Sorensen]

I says it once, I says it two times: it's brilliant. And even better, it fits any "Lifeboat" scenario, from NotLD to The Thing to...heck, this weeks "everyone gets amnesia" episode of Buffy (where the relationship map appeared to have been drawn during play, were it a game).

[Tim C Koppang]

I like it.

It seems that more and more games are playing with the idea that the player has all the decision making power for his character.  Dying Earth's persuasion mechanic for instance, can force a character to do something that the player would never have dreamed of doing--this I say is a good thing.  It's a new direction for gaming, and presents players with situations that they may not know at once how to handle.  Instead of being creative in only one way, the players are forced to branch out and be creative in multiple directions.

I'm not sure if the simulationists will like it, but there is an audience out there who would being very willing to delve further.  Like me.  :smile:

[Ron Edwards]

[loud Tyrannosaurus noise from bad 70s TV]

Excellent! Over the Edge meets Puppetland meets Dead Meat.

I'd play in two seconds.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

On 2001-11-15 23:20, fleetingGlow wrote:
I'm not sure if the simulationists will like it, but there is an audience out there who would being very willing to delve further.  Like me.  :smile:

Of course Simulationists will like it. I've been saying that limiting player response is a cool idea for quite a while now. And lots of games already do this. Pendragon, CoC, Underground Armies. All these games have mechanics that force the player to play the character in a certain way after certain things happen.

One of my favorite moments in CoC is when my character loses it and I get to play crazy. I like playing real straight simple folk who suddenly become maniacal summoners of Shub-Niggurath after reading the wrong thing. Or in Pendragon being forced to act compasionaltely because my character sheet says I'm compasionate and the die roll just enforced that.

These sorts of mechanics are simply the universe imposing itself on the character. My character must breathe too. I can't have him choose to stop breathing just becuse he doesn't want to. Similarly there will be times when things affect his psychology that he probably wouldn't like, things that might affect his effectiveness or reactions. It's great when games have good rules to take this into account.

The GURPS designers noted that, while you can theoretically attack somebody with a sword once per second (or more), it happens rarely in real combat. Asking why, they discovered a whole host of psychological reasons (fear being prominent) and published some interesting rules about it. This sort of thing fascinates me (and other Simmies I'd guess).

I have no problem with any rule that limits player control of characters as long as those rules don't remove the ability of the player to make a protagonist out of the character. Given the possibility of simulated danger, both physical and mental, and the fact that the investigators are common folks to boot, I find that CoC makes the characters just downright heroic if they act with any bravery at all. I find the heroism of a person who you know to be afraid but who presses on anyhow to be more realistic, and more powerful than that of the character who never feels any fear. Thus by forcing the character to feel fear, the game ensures this heroism.

Oh, yeah, and you don't need to Author as much, the game'll do that for you.

Just my $.02,

Mike

[contracycle]

Yeah I agree - the world impinging on character psychology is good sim.  I too like this sort of mechanic, always have done.

[unodiablo]

Very Interesting, Zak...

I'm actually going a similiar direction with the new system for the 'paper-published' version of Dead Meat (coming to a gaming group near you - Spring 2002!).

Instead of stating your intended action, and rolling a bucket 'o dice to get successes (which works great in many games, don't get me wrong...), you now roll 3d6, arrange them vs. your 'stats', and then either the player or GoreMaster narrates the outcome, depending on what it is. I like the way it works so far, it adds to the tension of the game, and I think in play it will help the players part with Personas (characters)...

Sean

[Mike Holmes]

Another thing, there is an important difference between railroading and these sorts of mechanics. Essentially, railroading, to be it's bad self, usually implies taking away player authority to have their character do what they want. This authority is often defined explicitly by such mechanics. That is to say, if the rules don't limit the player mechanically, then those decisions are the purview of the player, usually. So a player, knowing that there are Sanity mechanics in a game, is not upset when they are told by the GM that due to a bad roll or circumstances that they now have to play their character crazy.

No, railroading is when there is no mechanic that requires the character to go to the Ancient Temple, but the GM finds a way to force the player to have their character do that anyhow. This is often through the threat of use of other mechanics not intended for this use ("The guards will certainly kill your character [using combat mechanics] if you don't go to the Ancient Temple"). The arbitrary appearance of plot elements that force such mechanics to be useful in this manner is railroading. The other more obnoxious version of railroading is just telling a player that they have to do something with their character.

But as long as the player agrees to the use of these mechanics before hand (usually implicitly by agreeing to plqay the system in question), they do not object to their use as is appropriate. It is no more railroading than telling the player that their character is dead due to loss of blood. I'd prefer something like "providing direction" which is what it does, in effect.

Mike

[Paul Czege]

Instead of stating your intended action, and rolling a bucket 'o dice to get successes (which works great in many games, don't get me wrong...), you now roll 3d6, arrange them vs. your 'stats', and then either the player or GoreMaster narrates the outcome, depending on what it is.

Oooooooohhh! Very nice! Doesn't require custom dice either. Dammit Sean!

Paul

[Bankuei]

I like the stress level rule.  It reminds me of the underused "stay cool under fire" rules that are in many games.  Staying calm, collect, and competant makes a bigger difference in everything than most games admit too.  You can see what a difference it makes for firefighters, police, soldiers, performers, and businessmen across the world...

Bankuei

[unodiablo]

Hey Paul!
Your group should be getting the basic rules next week, I'll send them to both you and Scott. Damn me indeed. :smile: It works pretty slick so far, lots of Personas die initially, and then as the Personas are whittled down (and become more adjusted to the carnage), and you find weapons, the inital and final die become less important, allowing you to 'fudge' results using the system...

I've got the whole book plotted out, about four artists (Dan Smith has agreed to do the cover, and the other artists are local and/or work for a PC game co., they're all very suited to this game!), and the re-done system written up. It's nice to have a big project to go crazy on again...

Sean

[mahoux]

This is nice.  I am trying to put together a game of ordinary people, and I am working with the idea of stress as well.  The main difference is that I am not necessarily looking to have a lot of antagonistic positions among PCs; I just want to watch their actions and decision-making break down as the stress of unfamiliar actions and territory mounts up.

However, I do like the idea of no "talking out a strategy". I have heard of games where people who are doing two independent things in separate locations start matching up their actions to get together.  "Out of the blue, my character decides to call her on his cell phone..." and that kind of crap.

Keep posting as you flesh out the game.  The premise and the mechanics seem intriguing.

[Ron Edwards]

Mahoux,

You may want to consider the difference between constructive, interesting, and cool uses of out-of-character strategizing, as opposed to contrived, aggravating uses. I think that simply disallowing ANY such interaction removes a lot of good things from play as well as the bad things.

Sean,

Let's see that game!!

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

Hello Again,

Personally, I was very surprised at the reaction to this post.  Thanks for the interest and the words of encouragement.  Perhaps, now I'll find the motivation to finally finish writing it all down.  Oh and I admit the bit about railroading was a bit off the cuff.

In any event some people seemed to be interested in the Stress Level mechanic so I thought I'd elaborate a little on how it works.  The Stress level does two things.  1) It adds a number of red dice to the difficulty roll made by the GM.  The complete formula for calculating the number of dice the GM rolls is: Difficulty Level (1-6) + Number of Players + Stress Level.  2) It adds a number of red dice to the purposing player's roll.  That is, the player who is trying to persuade other players to help him rolls a number of green dice equal to the number of green links he shares with the other players.  He also rolls a number of red dice equal to the number of red links he shares with the other players plus the stress level.  In the first pass of interpretation his green dice help cancel out his red dice.  The remaning red dice are the compared to the results of the other players to determine the "get along factor."  So, the higher the Stress Level the LESS likely the characters are to get along.

Now if possible I'd like some help with a problem I can't get around.  I want to try and keep the mechanic as uniform as humanly possible.  The problem I have is what happens when the player wants to attempt something alone?  And oddly this ties directly to what happens when the player tries to persuade only a subset of the characters.

Option A) When trying to persuade only a subset of the players the persuading character STILL rolls green dice and red dice based on ALL the players but the player simply declares that some players default to Neutral (those players have the option to downgrade to Hostile, if the wish).  In other words he loses the posibility that they might be friendly but eliminates the risk of those characters being forcably hostile.  This means that if the character chooses to act alone he simply is declaring ALL the other players to be Neutral.  Basically we'd skip the Player Co-operation interpretation and jump right to the Event Outcome interpretation.  This causes one problem: Since the persuading player's red dice do NOT factor into the Event Outcome interpretation this means that when acting alone the player simply rolls a number of green dice equal to all the green links that player has coming off of them.  As the number of players increases the number of green lines is going to increase at a much faster rate than just adding the number of players to the difficulty. (For every player the difficulty increases by one but the number of green links between players increases by 2 to 4.  Red links increase at a comparable rate).  This means that the real deciding factor in the difficulty of a task will be the Stress Level.  So, in order to keep the incentive HIGH for trying to persuade other players the Stress Level would have to also be kept high which greatly decreases the odds of the players getting along at all.  I'm not sure if this is a good idea.

Option B) When trying to persuade only a subset of the players the persuading player rolls a number of red dice and green dice based ONLY on the players he is trying to persuade.  In this case players who active choose to downgrade from Neutral to Hostile have a greater impact because the persuading player is rolling an initially smaller green die pool that does not include the green dice from the voluntarily Hostile player AT ALL.  This means that when acting alone the player technically has NO green dice.  But that doesn't seem right.  So this case would require a specialty rule.

Specialty Rule Option 1) The player rolls a number of green dice equal to the difficulty of the task.  This means that with no other players and a Stress Level of zero the player has about a fifty-fifty chance of doing anything, regardless of difficulty.

Specialty Rule Option 2) The player rolls some default number of green dice.  Probably 2 or 3 given the difficulty range of 1 through 6.  This is fairly standard technique found in a lot of other RPGs.

Note: None of the above takes into account various modifiers but they are inconsequencial to the dillema at hand.

So what do you think?  Option A is appealing because it keeps the rules 100% uniform with no need for special casing.  However, it runs the risk of putting too much emphasis on the Stess Level which could create a downward spiral of failure but I'm not sure since I haven't tested it.  Option B) Requires special casing of which either sub option seems viable.  It ALSO makes the decision to downgrade from Neutral to Hostile much more impactful.

What do you think?

Jesse

Note: It might be helpful to understand that red dice do not AUTOMATICALLY cancel green dice or vice versa.  The goal in general is to roll more evens on green dice than odds on red dice.  In some cases green evens cancel red odds and in others red odds cancel green evens.  The point being that if a red die comes up even it has no effect.  Similarly if a green die comes up odd it has no effect.

[Mike Holmes]

I like option 2B. State it like this. The player gets a number of dice based on his skill, attribute, trait, descriptor, whatever. One by default, and up to three or maybe even four. To these he adds the appropriate green and red dice for trying to influence other characters, and the stress level.

I think that you may still be hiding stuff from us. I cannot see why you'd have the total number of characters added to the difficulty, for example. It may make sense with your final resolution, but I can't see it from how you have it laid out.

Are the difficulty dice red, green, neutral color, or what? Dice for players. Need more info.

Mike