Hi everyone.

I've lurked here for a year or so. I'm an older gamer and haven't been heavily involved in the hobby for many years. My first experiences in gaming were with DnD, from there moving quickly on to Marc Miller's Traveller. I collected many games over the years, playing some of them, and reading the others mostly out of fascination with the various design approaches.

My enthusiasm for gaming was rekindled by the Joss Whedon series Firefly. No movie or television show I've seen comes closer to being a log from a roleplaying game than this series. It took me straight back to the wonder and excitement I felt running those first few Traveller campaigns.

But there were some obvious differences between the episodes of the series and the types of stories we played out in game sessions. The stories were heavily character oriented, and while the crew typically was faced with conflict similar to an RPG scenario, the most interesting moments were those that revealed a little more about who the characters were, as opposed to what they accomplished.

I got to thinking about this in game terms, trying to come to some understanding of why our game sessions usually didn’t live up to this kind of drama. Obviously the writers and actors on a professionally produced television series will always have the edge when it comes to witty banter and moving scenes, but I felt roleplaying game rules could do more to promote depth of character and interesting dialogue.

The incentive issue seemed to be the key. I’ve had a few players over the years who would go the extra mile and play their characters in ways that didn’t directly relate to the conflict at hand. But there’s very little incentive for that kind of play in most games, and even those that do support it seem to do so as an afterthought, not as an integral part of play. (As I’ve stated, I haven’t been active in the last few years and there are obviously many games I’ve overlooked, so please excuse my ignorance. I’m only commenting on what I’ve seen)

Anyway, I suppose I’m getting longwinded. My main point with the game I am designing is to restructure the usual incentive/reward structure to promote drama and dialogue closer to something we might see in good serial fiction. Rather than reward characters for skillful conquest, my thought was to reward players for interesting roleplaying.

In order to give players a fighting chance, I’ve developed a trait and exposition system designed to give them direction. Basically players adopt personality traits for their characters. They are then dealt cards from a standard poker deck as reward for exemplifying these traits in play. The cards are then used to build hands that can be played for various bonuses in play, more on that later.

Players are also encouraged to create secret traits for their characters – traits that the characters generally don’t want other people to know. These might be darker details about the character but not necessarily so. When players manage to hint at these traits in play, they are dealt a wild card. The catch is, they are only able to play secret traits in this way so long as they remain secret. If most of the other players, or any of the principal NPC’s, discover the true nature of their secret, it is no longer playable for wild cards. The idea is to promote character revelation in a gradual and hopefully intriguing way.

There are other ways to earn cards as well. I’ve tried to keep the whole system aimed at promoting roleplaying that isn’t directly associated with ‘defeating the bad guy’. There’s plenty of incentive for that already. My goal is to give players a sort of ‘improv script’ that gives clear guidelines for what is desirable character development and exposition, but doesn’t require any railroading in terms of plot.

The reward structure is probably best saved for another post, if you all think one is warranted. There are lots of other specifics I'd like to discuss here, but before that my question is this: Is this approach worth trying out? Has it been done before?

Anyway, thanks for reading this, and I’ll apologize in advance for any blunders in etiquette. I’ll be happy to modify my posting style to conform if asked.

EDIT: I have a working copy in PDF form that I'd be glad to e-mail anyone with an interest in reading it. It's called "Free Trader" for now, for lack of a better name.

sergeant_x wrote: Hi everyone.

I've lurked here for a year or so. I'm an older gamer and haven't been heavily involved in the hobby for many years. My first experiences in gaming were with DnD, from there moving quickly on to Marc Miller's Traveller. I collected many games over the years, playing some of them, and reading the others mostly out of fascination with the various design approaches.

My enthusiasm for gaming was rekindled by the Joss Whedon series Firefly. No movie or television show I've seen comes closer to being a log from a roleplaying game than this series. It took me straight back to the wonder and excitement I felt running those first few Traveller campaigns.

But there were some obvious differences between the episodes of the series and the types of stories we played out in game sessions. The stories were heavily character oriented, and while the crew typically was faced with conflict similar to an RPG scenario, the most interesting moments were those that revealed a little more about who the characters were, as opposed to what they accomplished.

I got to thinking about this in game terms, trying to come to some understanding of why our game sessions usually didn’t live up to this kind of drama. Obviously the writers and actors on a professionally produced television series will always have the edge when it comes to witty banter and moving scenes, but I felt roleplaying game rules could do more to promote depth of character and interesting dialogue.

The incentive issue seemed to be the key. I’ve had a few players over the years who would go the extra mile and play their characters in ways that didn’t directly relate to the conflict at hand. But there’s very little incentive for that kind of play in most games, and even those that do support it seem to do so as an afterthought, not as an integral part of play. (As I’ve stated, I haven’t been active in the last few years and there are obviously many games I’ve overlooked, so please excuse my ignorance. I’m only commenting on what I’ve seen)

Anyway, I suppose I’m getting longwinded. My main point with the game I am designing is to restructure the usual incentive/reward structure to promote drama and dialogue closer to something we might see in good serial fiction. Rather than reward characters for skillful conquest, my thought was to reward players for interesting roleplaying.

In order to give players a fighting chance, I’ve developed a trait and exposition system designed to give them direction. Basically players adopt personality traits for their characters. They are then dealt cards from a standard poker deck as reward for exemplifying these traits in play. The cards are then used to build hands that can be played for various bonuses in play, more on that later.

Players are also encouraged to create secret traits for their characters – traits that the characters generally don’t want other people to know. These might be darker details about the character but not necessarily so. When players manage to hint at these traits in play, they are dealt a wild card. The catch is, they are only able to play secret traits in this way so long as they remain secret. If most of the other players, or any of the principal NPC’s, discover the true nature of their secret, it is no longer playable for wild cards. The idea is to promote character revelation in a gradual and hopefully intriguing way.

There are other ways to earn cards as well. I’ve tried to keep the whole system aimed at promoting roleplaying that isn’t directly associated with ‘defeating the bad guy’. There’s plenty of incentive for that already. My goal is to give players a sort of ‘improv script’ that gives clear guidelines for what is desirable character development and exposition, but doesn’t require any railroading in terms of plot.

The reward structure is probably best saved for another post, if you all think one is warranted. There are lots of other specifics I'd like to discuss here, but before that my question is this: Is this approach worth trying out? Has it been done before?

EDIT: I have a working copy in PDF form that I'd be glad to e-mail anyone with an interest in reading it. It's called "Free Trader" for now, for lack of a better name.

greedo1379 wrote:
...I would like to say that one of the real reasons there is such a problem with rewards systems involving character exposition / development is that the area is so subjective. I mean if you do 4 points of damage to the kobold it dies and the player gets 15 XP. How do you do something similar for good role playing?

... Would there be other advancement rules like XP (or something like taht) as well? Or would you like to do away with all that and make it all cards only?

Once the character does something according to the secret trait won't that secret trait be known? Perhaps not the exact details but the gist of it? Jane's a double crosser. Once he double crosses everyone knows he's a double crosser. Right?

I don't know what approach you are talking about. Rewarding proper role playing? The D6 Star Wars RPG had force points and character points. Force points were gotten by doing something particularly spectacular: putting yourself in a dangerous situation to help some innocent people, etc. The points were used to modify die rolls. Character points were awarded at the end of a session to reward a good session. They were used for advancement or to modify rolls. I really liked this way of doing things. There was no list of character traits though.

...Beyond that though I'm not sure such a system is really necessary. Assuming XP or similar is in your game at the end of a session when you assign them you just say "Betty did an awesome job playing his character. I could totally see that Inara was in love with Mal but her character is too strong willed and independant to want to get herself involved. She gets an extra 200 XP." Or something similar. Once your players realize that you do notice when they play well and reward them using the already present reward system adding a new reward system seems rather superfluous.

The plan is to do away with xp style skill/level advancement altogether. Characters in serial fiction don't generally make a steady climb to super heroism. Character improvement, if and when it happens, would be part of the play. This is one of the things I liked best about Traveller, though very few games followed up on it. In fact, I think the xp/level paradigm is one of the most unfortunate artifacts of early RPG design and one of the biggest flaws carried over to computer rpg's, but that's another topic.

Not necessarily. His betrayal wouldn't necessarily be apparent. That's the challenge for a player, to act out these secret traits, but not give it all away.
A better example would be Book. Everytime he mentions some knowledge that a preacher shouldn't really know, he's playing a secret trait. I wanted a game mechanic that could allow players to have some level of intrigue. In most cases I'd hope it wouldn't be about betrayal, or backstabbing, but just a way to give characters backgrounds that are revealed over time.

What I have set up so far is the notion of a 'storyboard'. This will be a list of all the hands players can make with their cards. Each hand will be keyed to a bonus. The bonuses default to various bonuses to attributes and skill rolls, but the real meat will be plot events, added during scenario design, that will give players interested in some control of the narrative a chance to manipulate things generally outside their influence. These might introduce prominent NPC's, trigger significant subplots, or give PC's access to some artifact or sage.... any number of things are possible.

I didn't make it clear in my first post, but I do intend to publish. At the very least as a downloadable PDF. In my wildest dreams everyone thinks its a great system, I find a wealthy backer and get the license from Mutant Enemy to actually call it a Firefly game. For now its just "Free Trader".

greedo1379 wrote: I think it might be interesting if, for the secret traits if you give them double the reward for a suitably dramatic "outing" before they finally lose that secret trait status. Just a thought.

So would the card hands be poker hands or what? Would a stronger poker hand give you more powers? Or am I just interpreting "poker deck" a little too literally?

sergeant_x wrote:
Poker hands are what I'm going with now, although others have suggested a more complex system where actual suits of cards are taken into account, with different suits affecting different types of results. But so far the storyboard just lists the basic poker hands... one pair, two pair, three of a kind, etc....

Hi sergeant, welcome to The Forge!

You should definitely check out Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson. This might be exactly the game you are looking for. He even metiones Firefly as one of the series he was inspired by!

One thread I could find is this one:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11351

Just ask him for a playtest copy.

Nicolas Crost wrote: Hi sergeant, welcome to The Forge!

You should definitely check out Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson. This might be exactly the game you are looking for. He even metiones Firefly as one of the series he was inspired by!

One thread I could find is this one:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11351

Just ask him for a playtest copy.

Hey Sarge:

Cool-sounding game (and thanks for the kind words on PTA).

I'm a firefly nut, obviously, and would love to see this game continue. You have a load of good ideas at work.

I'm especially interested in the improv script and maybe an example of how you and the players would use it in play.

Regarding the generation of hands: how does that work? How many cards do I start a game with? Is the reward system the only way to get additional cards in play?

Tell me more! More, damn you! More!

Matt Wilson wrote: ...I'm especially interested in the improv script and maybe an example of how you and the players would use it in play.

Regarding the generation of hands: how does that work? How many cards do I start a game with? Is the reward system the only way to get additional cards in play?

Regarding the secret traits, I like the fact that it is in the interest of the player to drop hints without giving it all away, but I wonder if maybe they should continue to be able to get bonuses for following through with it. Obviously you had Book in mind, and it works great for him. But it doesn't work as well for Jeyne or Inara. It is obvious from the start that Inara has a crush on Mal and that Jeyne is a double-crosser. The secret is out, very much for the audience, and for the more perceptive characters. But it is because it is out that it creates dramatic tension, which is what makes the story engaging. In every scene with Inara and Mal, there is this blatantly obvious subtext. Inara is aware of it, the audience is aware of it, but Mal is totally clueless. It is the subtext, not the text, that grabs the audience's attention, and the fact that Mal is so clueless that makes it amusing.

I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but I feel like the system needs to be able to accomodate both characters with real secrets, like Book, and characters with "secrets" that everyone knows, like Inara.

Henri wrote: Regarding the secret traits, I like the fact that it is in the interest of the player to drop hints without giving it all away, but I wonder if maybe they should continue to be able to get bonuses for following through with it. Obviously you had Book in mind, and it works great for him. But it doesn't work as well for Jeyne or Inara. It is obvious from the start that Inara has a crush on Mal and that Jeyne is a double-crosser. The secret is out, very much for the audience, and for the more perceptive characters. But it is because it is out that it creates dramatic tension, which is what makes the story engaging. In every scene with Inara and Mal, there is this blatantly obvious subtext. Inara is aware of it, the audience is aware of it, but Mal is totally clueless. It is the subtext, not the text, that grabs the audience's attention, and the fact that Mal is so clueless that makes it amusing.

I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but I feel like the system needs to be able to accomodate both characters with real secrets, like Book, and characters with "secrets" that everyone knows, like Inara.

Henri Wrote

Regarding the secret traits, I like the fact that it is in the interest of the player to drop hints without giving it all away, but I wonder if maybe they should continue to be able to get bonuses for following through with it. Obviously you had Book in mind, and it works great for him. But it doesn't work as well for Jeyne or Inara. It is obvious from the start that Inara has a crush on Mal and that Jeyne is a double-crosser. The secret is out, very much for the audience, and for the more perceptive characters. But it is because it is out that it creates dramatic tension, which is what makes the story engaging. In every scene with Inara and Mal, there is this blatantly obvious subtext. Inara is aware of it, the audience is aware of it, but Mal is totally clueless. It is the subtext, not the text, that grabs the audience's attention, and the fact that Mal is so clueless that makes it amusing.