There's a contest for the captain with the slowest boat. Two captains enter. How do you prove who actually has the slowest boat, since either captain can purposely go slower than the boat is capable of?

Answer: Have them race, but make the captains switch boats.


This is a riddle I read in an economics book a long time ago about tricks economists have for getting the truth out of people. I'm wondering if I can get any similar insight from people here.

Say I have a system that allows people to pick any sort of skill or attribute for their character they like, from "Terrified of open spaces" to "Moderately fluent in French" to "Perfect Master of the Sun Source of All Martial Arts". Let's rate their utility from -10 to 10: -10 being something that is completely debilititating in almost every situation, and 10 is something that is incredibly useful almost all the time.

What I'd like is to get each players honest evaluation of how valuable each of the attributes they've made up. But I don't want to limit it in any other way - if they want to load up on descriptors that would all rank at a 10, then good for them. All I want is some way to get them to admit it - I don't want them to "downplay" their utility.

(I also recognize that this does not reflect an "objective" value. A person may rate being a catburglar as very useful, but obviously if the adventure is all about court romance, it will be less so.)

Do any of you know any clever ways - along the lines of the slow boat race above - to pull out this sort of honest evaluation? I've tried pricing strategies: making people bid for attributes. The problem becomes that I don't want people to never be able to afford an attribute. The idea is not to limit, but simply to measure. I wonder if an answer might be found in some sort of auctioning system, but I run into the same problem, as well as the issue of players conspiring to underbid everything.

I've got friends who regularly change character disadvantages into advantages and turn characters advantages into disadvantages through skilled play. They can make a mockery of character advantages and disadvantages. Wouldn't any cost/buying system that works in the design stage of the character design be made useless by this kind of play?

What I'd like is to get each players honest evaluation of how valuable each of the attributes they've made up.

Having thought a good deal about this, I think there are several potential answers--but no really good ones.

Firstly: A player's (IMO logical) assessment of how good an ability can be based on how good the character is in relation to the standard and how easily that ability will be brought into play (there are clearly other ways to estimate--I think this is a resonable one).

This is why combat abilities are often more expensive than non-combat ones: force can be used as a means of problem-solving (both in reality, unfortunately and in RPG's) whether or not the situation is inherently violent. If the GM doesn't bring combat "to the table" many (IMO common) RPG situations allow the player to initate it (people say fighting in Call of Cthulhu is useless--but even excepting cultists, a real bad-ass who finds himself run afoul of hostile townsfolk might further the groups aims by taking a few of them down handliy when tempers reach the breaking point).

How good you are in relation to the standard is important too: Having basic cat-burgular skills may mean that:
1. From a let-the-dice-fall-where-they-may standpoint (assuming the world is run "realistically") that the character can't expect to achieve really spectacular results (the crown jewels cannot be stolen by an average thief or it'd be gone already). Hope of spectacular results usually requires spectacular skill or hope for an unusual situation.

2. From a dramatic standpoint, while character's minor abilites sometimes sway the day, characters are more often (I'd say) successful for their primary traits. Han Solo is successful because he's the best pilot going, not because he's a mediocre space-chess player. There are many counter-examples of this, however, which brings the next point up.

Secondly: A person can judge the value of an attribute by measuring how committed the GM is to making the character's traits germane to the story. If the GM is committed to going down the character sheet and going "You speak French? Okay, the international spy is from France ..." then it's more important than if the GM runs a module and doesn't adjust it to the character.

Thirdly: Based on setting, genre expectations, and experience with the GM's representation of imaginary worlds, the players may have an image of a "standard case" of the game that is to be run. A game set on the surface of Dune will see little use for fishing and naval navigation skills. A game set on a space station will likely have no use for water breathing (and, again, I say this from a purely stereotype standpoint--a specific space station could involve great conduits of water for the dolphin-race cadre ... but that's an exception, not the rule).

So there's no way to know for sure.

What I (have done--and believe is a reasonable answer in some respects) is to say the following things:

1. Hard Sciences and Combat ability are a little more expensive than academic ability. This is a very questionable value judgment--it's based on observations of niche protection, expectation of reality (weakly, in some contexts), and some observations about how I've run games in the past.

2. Diminishing Returns for everything: this makes being really exceptional expensive but being, you know, decent at something pretty cheap. It's my observation that being moderately good at something is substantially less valuable than being really good at it and diminishing returns (each extra point cost more than the last) is good for that.

This is especially true of attacks in games where there is reasonably common armor that absorbs damage (it's mathematically true: damage below a certain number goes to zero against armored opponents).

3. I encourage players to give me their characters before the game situation is finalized which goes a long way to making sure there is mutual interest on the part of the players in the situation and that the characters are reasonably cast as protagonists (i.e. that their characters and thus abilities have some relevance to the situation--but not an absolute attention to each skill being useful in some projected likely scene).

-Marco
* Some people will say this is because games traditionally have big combat sections. I disagree with that--but whether it's true or not, the fact remains that even if the GM's complications are basically pacificistic in nature a player may choose to employ force or credible threat of force in many traditional RPG situations (even court intrigue).

You might want to have a look at the FATE system that requires the players to think about this as part of the character creation process. It has Aspects which give a bonus to the player if they are used by the player in positive way and a bonus later in the game if the GM uses them in a negative way.

There is no such thing as a positive or negative Aspect. There are only descriptive aspects which can be positive or negative depending on the circumstance.

You can find FATE here:

http://www.faterpg.com

Hudson Shock wrote:
Do any of you know any clever ways - along the lines of the slow boat race above - to pull out this sort of honest evaluation? I've tried pricing strategies: making people bid for attributes. The problem becomes that I don't want people to never be able to afford an attribute. The idea is not to limit, but simply to measure. I wonder if an answer might be found in some sort of auctioning system, but I run into the same problem, as well as the issue of players conspiring to underbid everything.

Thanks for the comments and your time. But - and I don't want to seem ungrateful - comments that boil down to "there's no reason to do this" aren't really helpful. Let's assume, just for the hell of it, that I've thought about this a lot and that the problem as I've outlined it is something that would be useful to solve, and not ignored.

EDIT - not to imply everyone did this, but there was some, and I don't want it to continue down this road.

Again, I know that these won't be objective "true" representations of how useful an attribute skill is. One person might see "Strong Willed" as something that is helpful only during torture or mind control. Another might see it as something that is useful almost all the time. The two people would thus give "strong willed" on their character sheets different scores.

Regarding the players that can turn disadvantages into advantages - well, that's exactly what I'm trying to measure. I don't want, as the rule writer or the GM, to say that "Fear of Spiders" is a -3 when a clever player actually has a dozen ways to turn it into an advantage. I want that player to give an honest estimation of what he thinks of it - which might be very different than a less clever player would think.




If no one can't think of a way to pull this sort of truth out of people, that's okay. Neither have I, so far. I have less ideal, but workable, methods I can use instead. But the people here are known for innovative solutions and I thought I'd throw it out and see if anybody salutes.


EDIT - I have F.A.T.E. Great game.

Neelk, that is exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of. It uses logic and mechanics to pull truthful evaluations out of people without depending on honesty.

Thank you very much. Unfortunately, off the top of my head, I don't think it's immediately applicable to my needs because any given attribute is something that will only go to the person who came up with it.

In other words, Albert makes up "Two years of Fencing training". I don't see how Bob and Carla can bid on that, since only Albert can end up with it - it's for his character after all.

But, again, this is exactly the kind of auction I wouldn't have thought of on my own, and maybe it'll inspire me to a real solution. Any other things like this - or a source of other similar ideas I can check out on my own - would be greatly appreciated.

My first thought is that you imply that the usefulness of an ability is something that the player secretly knows but might not be honest about. I don't think that's the case. How useful an ability turns out to be depends a lot on everyone else in the group (i.e. what the GM does and what the other players do).

--------

One concept from several games (notably Theatrix and The Babylon Project) is to evaluate advantages/disadvantages during play. That is, when an advantage proves useful to you, you have to pay out points for that use. Conversely, if a disadvantage proves to be a real hindrance to you, then you gain points at that time.

Thus, people can take whatever abilities they want during character creation. The PCs who are powerful as defined will be spending all their points just to use their existing abilities. The PCs who are less effective will accumulate excess points. They can spend these points to gain new abilities and thus the system will correct itself.

That's the principle, at least. There are a number of pitfalls. (1) There is the possibility of players encountering "Well, I logically should be able to do that, but I'm out of points." (2) Trying to evaluate usefulness in play adds more decisions and bookkeeping to action, thus slowing down play. (3) This system in a sense penalizes creatively finding uses for your abilities -- or at least there is no advantage to doing so.

John Kim wrote: My first thought is that you imply that the usefulness of an ability is something that the player secretly knows but might not be honest about. I don't think that's the case. How useful an ability turns out to be depends a lot on everyone else in the group (i.e. what the GM does and what the other players do).

One concept from several games (notably Theatrix and The Babylon Project) is to evaluate advantages/disadvantages during play. That is, when an advantage proves useful to you, you have to pay out points for that use. Conversely, if a disadvantage proves to be a real hindrance to you, then you gain points at that time. That's the principle, at least. There are a number of pitfalls. (1) There is the possibility of players encountering "Well, I logically should be able to do that, but I'm out of points." (2) Trying to evaluate usefulness in play adds more decisions and bookkeeping to action, thus slowing down play. (3) This system in a sense penalizes creatively finding uses for your abilities -- or at least there is no advantage to doing so.

One thing that I don't get is why they wouldn't be honest in the first place. I mean, the way you described they have no reason not to be honest.

And that's where I'm having a bit of trouble to find an answer. Without knowing the player's motivation to underestimate (or superestimate), it is hard to find a strategy to avoid it.

Andreas

aplath wrote: One thing that I don't get is why they wouldn't be honest in the first place. I mean, the way you described they have no reason not to be honest.

And that's where I'm having a bit of trouble to find an answer. Without knowing the player's motivation to underestimate (or superestimate), it is hard to find a strategy to avoid it.

John Kim wrote:
One concept from several games (notably Theatrix and The Babylon Project) is to evaluate advantages/disadvantages during play.

That's the principle, at least. There are a number of pitfalls. (1) There is the possibility of players encountering "Well, I logically should be able to do that, but I'm out of points."

(2) Trying to evaluate usefulness in play adds more decisions and bookkeeping to action, thus slowing down play.

(3) This system in a sense penalizes creatively finding uses for your abilities -- or at least there is no advantage to doing so.

Hi Hudson,

An issue specific to roleplaying games is that any defining feature of a character can change in usefulness based on how the game is played. Consider the classic issue between combat and social conflict. A game heavy in one will find that skills in that area will become more important than the other.

Probably the best way to measure "how important" a given trait is- try measuring how often its called upon during play, and how important the results are of success/failure. For example, if you find a skill is called on 20 times during a session, odds are that its pretty important. Likewise if a skill is used to prevent the player from being barred from play(such as their character dying).

In this way, you don't have to worry about player perceptions of "how important" anything is, and you also take into account that some focus will shift based on the campaign or game.

Chris

Well, this is precisely what my system does. It does an evaluation after each session - if the campaign morphs over time into something favoring stealth over combat, stealth based charactesr will find themselves earning less "bonus points".

Again, the problem is in the first session, before any in-play data can be accumulated.

I'm going to step away from this thread for a couple of days, and let anybody who wants to hash something out. It's too easy to fall into the trap of defining too much of my system to early, or become defensive about it, if I'm jumping into the discussion all the time.

Much like your example of the river boats (when I first heard it, it was about racing camels...funny change, eh), we have this for roleplay.

Say a player has a disadvantage. At some point the GM says it applies. The player starts arguing it wouldn't apply.

Why? Because honesty is punished. A person who just complies gets a punishment/the disadvantages penalty. Thus the system encourages the player to argue his way out of it, because doing so atleast sometimes comes out with a better result than just being compliant.

The system rewards trying to avoid it. But what if you reward it's application. How about everytime the disadvantage is applied the PC gets some experience or some other reward. Soon you'll have the player bugging the GM 'C'MON! My disadvantage WOULD apply, and heres why!' over and over.


Thanks for sticking with me. Now how does this apply to you? Well currently, your players are/will downplay something bought because frankly honest evaluation isn't rewarded.

What if you asked them to rate the effectiveness of each thing, and gave them some small reward which is scaled with the rating. The higher they rate things in effectiveness, the bigger the reward.

Most people want to be honest and giving them even a small reward for doing so will probably get you dead on estimates (They'll think "Ah, its a four...ah, but is that true? And if I make it the five I suspect it is, it'll give me a reward. Ah hell, its a five"). Some people might still underplay, because the reward isn't enough. But I'm inclined to thing you'll always get people who don't mesh well with a system.

Just to clarify the question--

• You aren't asking players to rate how good their characters are at something;• You are asking how important something their character is or does will be in play, in terms of how advantageous or disadvantageous it will be.


Here's a thought.

What I see you trying to get from the player is his own prediction concerning how useful/valuable or how detrimental each characteristic of his character is going to prove to be in play that has not yet happened. You're trying to get his honest assessment. You specifically want to avoid having the referee make that judgment at the outset, even though there is a mechanical means of making that judgment once one session has been played, based entirely on how useful or detrimental each factor in fact was in that previous session.

Why not make it a corporate decision? Once all the characteristics are on paper, make a list of them, give a copy of the list to each player, and have each player rate each of those characteristics in terms of how valuable or detrimental he thinks they will be. Then use those results. The referee might or might not be included as one of the voters. Depending on how many players you have, you could use any of these values as the actual value:

• The arithmetic mean, that is, the average--add everyone's estimate together and divide by the total number of players. This lets everyone impact the assessed value of the ability.• The average of all answers except the extremes--that is, toss out the highest and the lowest, and average the rest. This eliminates the player who decides to skunk everyone else, and the player who decides to advantage himself, either of whom might provide a value way out of range in order to shift the average up or down as desired.• The mode, that is, the number that occurs most frequently. I have a lot of trouble with the mode in small data pools though--the odds for example of two out of five people giving the same number on a twenty-one point scale (-10 to 10) are pretty slim, and to hope that this represents a common understanding of the value is really pushing things. If you had a large group and a small range, that would work, but that doesn't sound like it's going to happen here.• The median, the answer that appears exactly in the middle when all the answers are placed in sequence. This may be the best choice, as it inherently eliminates all the extreme answers. If three out of five players think the ability is a ten, it's a ten, even if the other two gave it a neg ten, because the middle answer is ten. Of course, you'd have to decide up front in the case of even numbers of participants whether you take the one above the middle or the one below the middle, or the average of the two (which may also require a rule for rounding). It also would not work so well if there are only three players, and not at all for two.

There may be other ways to determine the answer from this data, but these strike me as the simplest.

I know that this doesn't really give you the player's honest assessment; however, it may give you the players' honest assessment, which may be sufficient for your purposes.

I hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

A thought: Once a player has evaluated their attributes, the GM "buys" one attribute of the GM's choice, at the player's estimated value. The character no longer has that attribute, and the player gets that attribute's "value" in some metagame currency.

This wouldn't work in a vacuum, of course -- players would tend to overvalue everything. But since your concern is that your system will push them to undervalue everything, maybe it could balance that.

It's worth noting, though, that players will be evaluating their character's attributes' value to them, but not necessarily their value in-game. If you have a player who has a firm concept of who and what they want their character to be, but little interest in "winning," they might rate apparently trivial attributes higher than those that provide in-game advantages.

Also, it doesn't work on negatively-valued attributes. Even if they had a starting fund of the necessary currency, a player isn't going to want to pay the GM for the privilege of losing an attribute they chose -- even if it's technically a disadvantage.

So it's not perfect... but maybe you can do something with it.

neelk wrote:

John Kim wrote: My first thought is that you imply that the usefulness of an ability is something that the player secretly knows but might not be honest about. I don't think that's the case. How useful an ability turns out to be depends a lot on everyone else in the group (i.e. what the GM does and what the other players do).

I think he's right. Most people are a little uncomfortable revealing their true preferences, as a defensive measure arising from the fact that almost all people are political animals prone to taking advantage.

neelk wrote:

John Kim wrote: One concept from several games (notably Theatrix and The Babylon Project) is to evaluate advantages/disadvantages during play. That is, when an advantage proves useful to you, you have to pay out points for that use. Conversely, if a disadvantage proves to be a real hindrance to you, then you gain points at that time. That's the principle, at least. There are a number of pitfalls. (1) There is the possibility of players encountering "Well, I logically should be able to do that, but I'm out of points." (2) Trying to evaluate usefulness in play adds more decisions and bookkeeping to action, thus slowing down play. (3) This system in a sense penalizes creatively finding uses for your abilities -- or at least there is no advantage to doing so.

Nobilis has a system like this for disadvantages, but the pitfalls you suggest aren't the ones that actually arose in practice. (1) and (2) don't apply in a point-bidding based system like Nobilis -- the characters have a base level of competence they can spend points to increase, and the point-spending *is* the mechanic so there is no extra time lost. And (3) doesn't happen because you can't solve a problem using an ability without a justification for it, so you still need to be creative in finding a way to make it applicable to the problem.

Instead, what most often happened is that the players played to their restrictions and then simply forgot to remind the HG to give them the points for it. I've seen this happen again and again as both a player and a game moderator.

M. J.: The methods you give are all subject to player collusion - everybody agreeing to minimize values to get the most out of it. (Again, something I think that happens automatically, not because of people being deliberately dishonest.) But something about them has a little back area of my brain percolating, which usually means that my subconscious has seen something not yet obvious to my conscious. By the way, I wasn't really intending to use a 21-step scale to measure things, I just threw that in as part of the "what if".

I suspect the bigger stumbling block would be time - that's a lot of data for a group to go through before being able to start the game. But maybe it could be simplified down by rating the character as a whole, instead of by each individual attribute.

Morgan: there's definately something to your method, balancing competing drives to maximize and minimize at the same time. Thanks; I'll play with that some.

I've been struggling with this same issue in My Eventual Game, and in sheer desperation wondered about turning the whole thing on its head:

Don't try to evaluate how often a given ability will be useful and price it from there. Instead, let the player say how often s/he wants an ability to come into play and let him/her price it according to that. If the player pays 90 character points per level of "knowledgeable about rutabagas," then, darn it, you as GM are now obligated to intrude rutabagas in some meaningful way into 90 percent of that character's scenes. If the player pays just 10 character points per level of "master swordsman," then you as GM only involve him in swordplay 10% of the time*.

* Which would be appropriate to depict, say, The Man in the Iron Mask , where all the main characters happen to have terrifying sword skills -- they used to be the Three Musketeers, after all -- but that's really incidental to the political intrigue that is 90% of the story.

Suppose abilities are rated according to how good the character is at them. Players are likely to put more points into the abilities they think are most useful. Many games do this. If I create a GURPS Traveller character and buy a skill level of 18 points into Handgun and 15 into Medic, it means I think being able to shoot a handgun well will be more useful than Medic skill.

If you don't want to have ability ratings directly related to percieved utility in this way, you could make the points the players allocate relate to the advancement system instead of initial ability ratings. The more points the player invests in a skill, the mroe easily it will be advanced in-game. That way you can use a different mechanism to determine initial ability ratings, but still get a fair assessment of how useful the players think the abilities will be in the long term. Also, it'[s only fair the players get some reward for doing all this work for you.


Simon Hibbs

Thanks for the ideas, everybody. You've given me plenty to think about.

Hudson Shock wrote: Thanks for the comments and your time. But - and I don't want to seem ungrateful - comments that boil down to "there's no reason to do this" aren't really helpful.

Doctor Xero wrote:
How much I value a particular attribute or ability will vary according to the campaign genre and the game master's habits of running a game.

Doctor Xero wrote: How much I value a particular attribute or ability will vary according to the campaign genre and the game master's habits of running a game.

Hudson Shock wrote: (I also recognize that this does not reflect an "objective" value. A person may rate being a catburglar as very useful, but obviously if the adventure is all about court romance, it will be less so.)

I might consider Style far more important an attribute than Self-Discipline in a swashbucklers-and-intrigue game, but I am more likely to value Self-Discipline than Style in a Cthulhuan game with temptations everywhere my player-character turns.

Would we be dishonest, as you imply, to tell her that we didn't value combat attributes that highly, even though we poured creation points into them for the guy's campaign?

Hudson Shock wrote: The whole point behind my developing system is that it self-corrects for mismatches between GMing styles and player choices. I'm simply seeking an acceptable solution for the first session, when no data on how the game actually goes is available yet.

Hudson Shock wrote: You'd be dishonest if you didn't tell her you didn't value combat. And you'd be a little dumb, because you'd be passing up a point to get the Fortune Points that balance out useless skills.
More to the point, you'd be dishonest if you said you didn't value "male eunuch" as an attribute, so that you could get more Fortune Points. I'm looking for a system that gets people to admit that while, normally, "eunuch" might be a disadvantage, in this situation they expect to it to be a plus. Get it?

Doctor Xero wrote: "In other words, the big flaw I see in your argument is that you conflate contextual valuations with default valuations.

Hudson Shock wrote: I also recognize that this does not reflect an "objective" value. A person may rate being a catburglar as very useful, but obviously if the adventure is all about court romance, it will be less so.

Well, realistically, you'd have some notion of basics like genre and such. You might even have a very detailed description from the GM as to what kind of game he intends to run. The more information, the more accurate your estimation, of course.

I'm looking for a system that gets people to admit that while, normally, "eunuch" might be a disadvantage, in this situation they expect to it to be a plus.

in an earlier post Hudson Shock wrote: If no one can't think of a way to pull this sort of truth out of people, that's okay. Neither have I, so far.

in a recent post Hudson Shock wrote: You'd be dishonest if you didn't tell her you didn't value combat.

in his most recent post Hudson Shock wrote: why do you think I don't understand the value of context in making a decision?

Here's a crazy idea that's probably not workable on one hand and doesn't give you enough information on the other, but take it as brain food.

I gather that there is no fixed number of "attributes" to be listed. Try this. Tell the players to choose their attributes, affix values to them, and then to list them from the most important to the least important in defining their character for this game. Indicate/imply that there's going to be a die roll which will determine how many of the listed attributes they actually get to keep.

There doesn't actually have to be a die roll, as long as they don't know there isn't going to be one.

This doesn't get you specific valuations, but it does get you relative valuations as a ranking. If from that you can derive the values you want, you're there.

--M. J. Young

Brain food indeed. Interesting. Hmm...

(Sorry if I haven't given much feedback on the ideas you have all given me - I haven't had much time to brainstorm on my system over the past couple of weeks. I'm just glad these posts are here for me to come back to when I can.)