Left Coast: Does my system encourage relaxed roleplaying?

[hix]

I've just finished a major rewrite of Left Coast – my entry into the October 2005 Ronnies competition. (Ronnies feedback thread, here; initial playtest thread, here)

In Left Coast, you play semi-famous science fiction authors living in late 1960s California. The game's inspired by the lives of people like Philip K. Dick and L. Ron Hubbard.

As an author, you try to balance your writing with the mundane pressures of your everyday lives, and you struggle to not go nuts under the strain of balancing those two things. As the game continues, authors gradually become aware that they may be trapped in a novel being written by one of the friends, who is subjecting them to a web of weird and unnatural forces that put pressure on their already-unstable lives.

In my first playtest, I was pretty happy with the character generation process and how it helped us create a setting that we all wanted to hang out in and explore. The problem in the first playtest was how to bring that setting to life. What I wanted to do with this rewrite was give the game clear procedures for turning the setting information into scenes.

Here's the rewrite: you can download it from 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters: Left Coast


MY AIM FOR THE GAME / THE REAL-WORLD REWARD SYSTEM

In the playtest, both Malcolm and Simon said they wanted to spend time hanging out with the characters and inhabiting them.

Related to this, I wanted to figure out how to make scenes work: my Ronnies draft had a very tight scene classification that forced characters into specific types of conflict. Ron's feedback about this was that "the game's scene-classification needs to be, if you'll forgive the expression, a little more Californian". In the playtest, I also had problems figuring out how to take all the rich setting information and wonderful eccentric NPCs we'd created and turn them into scenes.

So I took both of those pieces of feedback and thought about the game I wanted to play. As a result, my rewrite of Left Coast has focused on helping a group create a relaxed, almost slacker roleplaying experience.

I want Left Coast to focus on letting you hang out with the characters and explore the setting. That means I want players to give the story room to breathe. Rather than pushing towards conflicts, I want to encourage players to circle around conflicts and let them simmer until the person playing an NPC decides that it feels right to have a conflict now.

I also want players to have fun by 'discovering' what's really going on. I really like playing games where you get an 'aha!' moment and you gain insights into what's really motivating an NPC. So I want the act of playing Left Coast to encourage a naturally emerging sense of what the NPCs and the weird forces in the authors' lives want to achieve.


A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM

Character Creation
You choose a basic archetype for your author and a significant personal relationship. Both of these provide you with a hint of problems and quirks in your author's life, which feeds into the next step: you define NPCs and significant relationships in four different areas of your author's life:

   - personal
   - business and money
   - psychological problems
   - weird and unnatural forces

You also define a goal that your author is working towards achieving. This gives your author some impetus to do something when the game begins.

Scene Play
While I was doing some solo playtesting of Left Coast, I discovered that I needed to do continuously do three things in order to turn the setting information into scenes, and to lay the groundwork for future scenes. Those three things are

   - Introduce a piece of backstory between the Author and the NPC that the Author is talking to
   - Talk about an NPC who isn't in the scene
   - Describe the tiniest possible hint of the Weird and Unnatural forces ('the Weird') intruding into the scene.

Continually doing those things helps give NPCs a sense of autonomy and life outside of when the author's around – it helps NPCs develop 'agency'. One of my goals for the game is to help the NPCs become well-rounded characters acting on their own motivations (motivations which aren't always in accord with what the author wants).

Developing NPC agency and gradually fleshing out what the Weird is up to will (I hope) mean that players are interested in a whole bunch of different aspects of the setting, and want to hope around from NPC to NPC to see what they're up to.

The basic reward mechanic
When conflicts occur, they're resolved using a Sorceror-style mechanic of comparing two opposing dice pools. The winner gets a number of success to spend on improving their stats and introducing new characters and information into the setting.

If a stat is reduced to zero or increased to seven, this triggers a special type of scene – a 'Reset' scene that radically changes what's happening in the author's story (with a different effect depend on which of the four areas of the author's life has been reset). EXAMPLES?

Longer-term reward mechanics
After completing scenes, players can decide which NPCs and elements of the setting they'd like to either focus on next or see again.

At the end of a session, the author who triggers the end of the session gets to improve their situation by selecting from a list of options: these include finding out secrets about NPCs, getting one step closer to achieving their goal, or fixing a problem in their life. Every player also gets the option of introducing a new goal for their author.


A SYSTEM CHART FOR LEFT COAST

Here's a system chart I drew of how this all works together:

Left Coast – System Chart (the basics)

This is just a basic overview. I'm going to do up a more elaborate chart, which describes some of the more intricate aspects of the system.


DOES LEFT COAST'S SYSTEM CREATE THE 'RELAXED ROLEPLAYING' I'M AIMING FOR?

As I said: what I'm looking to create with this game is a relaxed pace to the roleplaying.

   - I want a play experience where conflicts naturally emerge rather than needing to be pushed for.
   - I want to make the game focus on hanging out with the characters and exploring the setting.
   - I want to encourage a naturally emerging sense of what the NPCs and the weird forces in the authors' lives want to achieve.

If this sounds like the sort of game you'd like to play, I'd be interested in your thoughts. Am I heading in the right direction? Have you got any suggestions about things I might want to consider or try differently?

Here's the download link again: Left Coast

[jburneko]

Steve,

So I've only really skimmed the new edition but the biggest barrier I see to a leisurely, exploratory approach is the fact that you have a mechanics driven session ender.  Such rules tend to dominate play quickly.  And if you have a group that normally meets for short period of time (2-3 hours) they're going to be grabbing for that lever fast and hard to make sure the session closes out in their preferred time frame.

Jesse

[Callan S.]

I'm not sure I understand that as a critique, Jesse? If the players accelerate it - well, they did that. Can a player stand there, with his foot on the accelerator, saying "Oh, this game is too fast!"? Granted one players idea of relaxed might be quite alot faster than someone elses. But while that could be mitigated with mechanics, that would also be a matter of the players - someones relaxed is someone elses slow or someone elses too fast.

I dunno - some people desire immersion so much their practice is to cease to acknowledge that they are responsible (in part) for the environment they are roleplaying in. Such a practice is problematic, I think.

[hix]

Jesse, that makes a lot of sense. That's a contradiction I didn't notice when I was designing the game.

My goal was to put the pacing for the session in the players' hands, and I hoped this might encourage multiple chapters during a single evening of play. (Callan: I definitely wanted to give the players that sense of control you're talking about.) The insecure part of me also wanted to give players an easy, polite way out if they weren't enjoying the game (just pump as many successes as possible into ending the story / chapter).

So, this is something I'll definitely have to watch out during playtesting: to see if this 'mechanics driven session ender' dominates play the way you've analysed it, Jesse.

My only counterpoint to this is that I suspect there's a difference between pacing inside a scene and the overall pacing of the session. That's what I take from Callan's point: playing through the scenes themselves can have a slow and relaxed pace and trigger conflicts whenever they seem appropriate. For some people, that pace'll be cool; for other players it'll be frustratingly slow - and it's those frustrated players I'd expect to pump all their successes into ending the story. If that's right, then I hope that the scenes will be relaxed, but the session's overall pacing will vary between relaxed and intense, depending on player preferences.