Okay, so design post I had going has slipped off the front page, so, according to Forge etiquette, I'm creating a new thread. The last thread was here:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13549

Thanks to Tobias, Sydney, Dan, Eero, Thomas, and Nate for help the last time around, and additional thanks to the IRC people who helped me sort out a few more things (Ben, Shreyas, etc. etc.).

Vesperteen is a game about teenagers, sin, and monsters.

I originally had characaters rated in stats called Sins, based on the Seven Deadlies (Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, Wrath), but, in conversation with Thomas, I admitted that these aren't really Sins in the theological or even practical sense. The Seven Deadlies aren't really Sins. They're character traits or tendencies that lead one into Sin. Being lustful isn't a Sin. Sleeping with 12-year-old kids (when you're 16 or so) probably is.

So, thought: what were formerly called Sins are called, collectively, "Forbidden Knowledge" or something like that. So you have Knowledge of Lust and Knowledge of Pride and what not. These are like esoteric secrets, dark knowledge of the evil of the world, and knowing more of a particular type of Forbidden Knowledge makes you better in the associated character trait: Cool, Buff, Rich, Hot, Smart, Slick, Bold. This lets you do stuff better.

So how do you gain more knowledge? You gain knowledge by being taught. See, that makes logical sense now. There is a process wherein people with greater Forbidden Knowledge teach a Lesson to those with less knowledge. This Lesson can be initiated by either side and involves some mechanics that I haven't quite nailed down yet. More on that later.

So normally, you have standard task resolution, where you roll a dice pool based on one of your traits (Cool, Buff, etc.), plus the amount of a resource called Self that you want to spend, and compare it to another dice pool (GM or another player). It's not a very progressive resolution system, but we can tie it into other stuff later and maybe tweak it more.

So, say you roll your dice and the result doesn't come out the way you want. You don't impress the boy you like, the bully punches you in the face, whatever. Or maybe you succeed, but lots of your Self dice come up really low, meaning you're going to lose confidence from the encounter. Not good. This is where Sin comes in. If you are willing to up the ante in the situation, if you are willing to hurt other people to get what you want, you can call on the power of Sin and re-roll a certain number of dice, trying to get a better roll than you currently have. Both players have this option, continuing to up the ante and re-roll to try to get a more perfect score. (Another possibility: you can re-roll Knowledge dice but not Self dice. However, having higher Knowledge dice pushes your Self dice down the row and makes it less likely that you'll lose Self).

I'm trying to figure out just how this "upping the ante" is going to work, since I want to make it distinct from Vincent's work on Dogs in the Vineyard, seeing as how high school is different from the West. First thought, the player decides on what they're going to do to make sure they succeed (depends on the situation, obviously) and then then the group throws out ideas about potentially bad consequences, with the GM picking an appropriate one. Obviously, more re-rolls means the consequences get worse and worse (or more and more).

I feel an example coming on:

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John Pride/Smart 3, Gluttony/Buff 2, Self 8
Jill Pride/Smart 2, Lust/Hot 4, Self 6

John is trying to convince Jill to go out with him, because she's really hot and he thinks she'll look good as arm candy (he's full of Pride, right?). First off, he tries to impress her with feats of strength and his rippling musculature before asking her (Gluttony/Buff). She tries to counter by turning up her nose at his crude, unintelligent antics (Pride/Smart).

John adds in 3 points of Self, rolling 2d6 + 3d6 (different color dice).
Jill adds in 4 points of Self, rolling 2d6 + 4d6.

Self Dice are in Black, and are always ranked before Sin dice of the same #.

43321 -- John
643221 -- Jill

So, comparing the above, Jill wins by 4 dice (6421), destroys 2 of Johns points of Self (John: 43), and loses no Self herself (32 are both ties). Note that Jills 1 is not blocked by anything, so it counts as a winning die.

John's player is none too happy with this. He wants to re-roll all of his Sin dice, since they're on the bottom. Since he's using Buff, he needs to commit some act of Gluttony in order to re-roll. He decides that John will outdrink everyone in the party with his incredible alcohol consumption powers and then victoriously ask Jill again, "Come on, really. Will you go to the movies with me?"

The players next suggest bad things that could happen to John: he could puke on his best friend's girlfriend, he could pass out on Jill's lap after she answers him, his parents could show up at the party looking for him (and find him drunk out of his mind). The GM nods at all of these and might even suggest some ideas.

Finally, before John re-rolls, the GM decides that John's younger sister should show up at the party, coming to take him home.

John re-rolls his Sin dice: 461. The comparison now looks like:

64431 -- John
643221 -- Jill

Now the result is tied with John at 2 dice (43) and Jill also at 2 dice (21), and Jill loses two points of Self (32) while John loses none. But, since it's a draw, neither side gets what they want. Jill doesn't agree to go out with John, but she hasn't completely rejected him either.

Next, John's sister shows up at the party, complicating matters.

And it's Jill's turn to decide whether she wants to re-roll or not...

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Okay, there you go. You wouldn't necessarily choose to roll all your dice, it just happened to work that way in this example, given the dice I rolled. You'd just pick the lower ones that you weren't satisfied with.

Problems:

1. There doesn't seem to be a high enough cost for re-rolls, just looking at it right now. I mean, maybe that's good. Maybe the players should be lulled into thinking, "Aw, they won't come up with something THAT bad will they." And then the other players totally destroy them. I like that the re-roll involves input from all the other players. That's good and will lead to vengeance, where people suggest horrible things to do to each other's characters out of revenge for the bad things suggested by others. Shades of Polaris here, I suppose, but Polaris rocks, so that's cool.

2. I want players to be able to switch the conflict from one Trait to another, at some sort of cost. So maybe Jill could switch from being too Smart for John to being too Hot for John. Pulling in extra dice or starting a whole new conflict or something. Suggestions on how this might work? Also what should the cost be for such a maneuver?

3. You should probably be able to spend more Self if you want at various points, becoming more invested in the conflict. Maybe you can't re-roll spent Self, but you can always roll more Self and try to push the lower dice out of danger? Would that work? The problem would be that you could spend more and more Self to ensure a win on the lower side of things, if you could get more dice than your opponent (since lower, unblocked dice count as wins). Help!

Maybe once you help me get that sorted out, we can find a decent mechanic for Lessons. First, though, let's see if we can get a conflict-resolution mechanic that makes sense.

Almost there!

Jonathan Walton wrote: ...say you roll your dice and the result doesn't come out the way you want..... If you are willing to up the ante in the situation, if you are willing to hurt other people to get what you want, you can call on the power of Sin and re-roll....I like that the re-roll involves input from all the other players. That's good and will lead to vengeance, where people suggest horrible things to do to each other's characters out of revenge for the bad things suggested by others.

Just a word-smithing thing: I'd recommend "Forbidden Teachings" rather than "Forbidden Knowledge." It seems more in keeping with your idea that the information is neither independent nor passive... it was taught to you, in a way that altered you, and now it forces others to teach it in turn.

I'm trying to figure out just how this "upping the ante" is going to work, since I want to make it distinct from Vincent's work on Dogs in the Vineyard, seeing as how high school is different from the West. First thought, the player decides on what they're going to do to make sure they succeed (depends on the situation, obviously) and then then the group throws out ideas about potentially bad consequences, with the GM picking an appropriate one. Obviously, more re-rolls means the consequences get worse and worse (or more and more).

Good to see Vespertine progressing! Always when you start these threads I get a sinful lust to grab the game and run, and make my own version that'd have everything exactly like I want. Painful.

As a general note, I advice: don't fear the medieval! A part of the charm in the concept is exactly that these teens are buffeted by a world that's fundamentally wrong to modern sensibilities. Don't bother hiding the mortal sins or making them somehow optional or anything like that. Revel in the incongruency and conflict between modern ideals and the medieval. Sure, hiding your head in the sand and waiting for sin to go away is a winning strategy in the great game, but will the modern world give you that option? Not likely!

Jonathan Walton wrote:
So, thought: what were formerly called Sins are called, collectively, "Forbidden Knowledge" or something like that. So you have Knowledge of Lust and Knowledge of Pride and what not. These are like esoteric secrets, dark knowledge of the evil of the world, and knowing more of a particular type of Forbidden Knowledge makes you better in the associated character trait: Cool, Buff, Rich, Hot, Smart, Slick, Bold. This lets you do stuff better.

So how do you gain more knowledge? You gain knowledge by being taught. See, that makes logical sense now. There is a process wherein people with greater Forbidden Knowledge teach a Lesson to those with less knowledge. This Lesson can be initiated by either side and involves some mechanics that I haven't quite nailed down yet. More on that later.

So normally, you have standard task resolution, where you roll a dice pool based on one of your traits (Cool, Buff, etc.), plus the amount of a resource called Self that you want to spend, and compare it to another dice pool (GM or another player). It's not a very progressive resolution system, but we can tie it into other stuff later and maybe tweak it more.

So, say you roll your dice and the result doesn't come out the way you want. You don't impress the boy you like, the bully punches you in the face, whatever. Or maybe you succeed, but lots of your Self dice come up really low, meaning you're going to lose confidence from the encounter.

Not good. This is where Sin comes in. If you are willing to up the ante in the situation, if you are willing to hurt other people to get what you want, you can call on the power of Sin and re-roll a certain number of dice, trying to get a better roll than you currently have. Both players have this option, continuing to up the ante and re-roll to try to get a more perfect score. (Another possibility: you can re-roll Knowledge dice but not Self dice. However, having higher Knowledge dice pushes your Self dice down the row and makes it less likely that you'll lose Self).

I'm trying to figure out just how this "upping the ante" is going to work, since I want to make it distinct from Vincent's work on Dogs in the Vineyard, seeing as how high school is different from the West. First thought, the player decides on what they're going to do to make sure they succeed (depends on the situation, obviously) and then then the group throws out ideas about potentially bad consequences, with the GM picking an appropriate one. Obviously, more re-rolls means the consequences get worse and worse (or more and more).

1. There doesn't seem to be a high enough cost for re-rolls, just looking at it right now. I mean, maybe that's good. Maybe the players should be lulled into thinking, "Aw, they won't come up with something THAT bad will they." And then the other players totally destroy them. I like that the re-roll involves input from all the other players. That's good and will lead to vengeance, where people suggest horrible things to do to each other's characters out of revenge for the bad things suggested by others. Shades of Polaris here, I suppose, but Polaris rocks, so that's cool.

2. I want players to be able to switch the conflict from one Trait to another, at some sort of cost. So maybe Jill could switch from being too Smart for John to being too Hot for John. Pulling in extra dice or starting a whole new conflict or something. Suggestions on how this might work? Also what should the cost be for such a maneuver?

3. You should probably be able to spend more Self if you want at various points, becoming more invested in the conflict. Maybe you can't re-roll spent Self, but you can always roll more Self and try to push the lower dice out of danger? Would that work? The problem would be that you could spend more and more Self to ensure a win on the lower side of things, if you could get more dice than your opponent (since lower, unblocked dice count as wins). Help!

Maybe once you help me get that sorted out, we can find a decent mechanic for Lessons. First, though, let's see if we can get a conflict-resolution mechanic that makes sense.

Thanks for the comments, folks. I seem to nail down at least one critical mechanic per design thread here. Last thread it was the relationship mechanics and so far I'm really digging the group-brainstormed consequences for re-rolls.

I've been seeing a kind of a dogmatism in your Vespertine work lately, you should really play it some to get it out of your system.

More stuff, after chatting with Shreyas and Josh over IRC:

So, all of this ties very well into the relationship mechanics from last time. Remember that you can invest Self in people in order to create relationships with them. You lose the Self you invest in others if you don't come to their aid when they are threatened (or otherwise let them down badly). However, by investing in them you hope that they invest in you and likewise come to your aid when you need it. Clique relationships are based on your Sin stats, not on Self. So Gluttony 3 would give you the equivilent of a Self 3 relationship with all Jocks, but it's totally superficial, not a real relationship. There will probably be a systematic difference between these.

Now, as far as consequences go, "kick a dog" is not nearly as interesting as "kicking the principle's dog in front of the whole school," and the relationship mechanic gives us a way to ensure that this kind of thing happens. Just some examples (not a real system yet):

1 - Do something bad.
2 - Do something bad to someone else's friends.
3 - Do something bad to your best friend's friends.
4 - Do something bad to your own friends.
5 - Do something unforgivable to your own friends.
6 - Do something beyond the pale to the person you have the most Self invested in.

In this way, friends are additionally valuable because you might have to burn them for extra social power. In fact, some of the higher levels of evilness might only be possible if you have friends, so you have people that you can destroy on your way to the top. However, burning your friends definitely means that you lose all the Self you invested in them, so we needed a way for you to gain Self that was equally interesting and unpleasant.

So I thought of the Final Fantasy method of gaining experience, where you wonder around beating up minor, defenseless monsters for the little bit of experience that they give you. Similarly, you could pick fights with defenseless underclassmen, invest some Self in the outcome, and then gain Self if you win (since I think you should gain Self equal to the Self you invested in a victorious conflict). Of course, it's always possible that the underclassman has a powerful senior brother, or is well connected, or has higher stats than you would suspect, or is willing to accept whatever consequences he needs to in order to show you up.

How do ya like them apples?

Jonathan Walton wrote: However, burning your friends definitely means that you lose all the Self you invested in them, so we needed a way for you to gain Self that was equally interesting and unpleasant.

So I thought of the Final Fantasy method of gaining experience, where you wonder around beating up minor, defenseless monsters for the little bit of experience that they give you. Similarly, you could pick fights with defenseless underclassmen, invest some Self in the outcome, and then gain Self if you win (since I think you should gain Self equal to the Self you invested in a victorious conflict). Of course, it's always possible that

Jonathan,

I just finished reviewing the logs from the IRC discussion last night... Here's my contribution: Burning friends (preemtively) means that you don't suffer the consequences of having them burned for you. Just like in real high school life!

If you ditch your friends before they become a liability then you lose nothing (or at least less). So perhaps you can burn a friend defensively to gain part of your Self back...?

Even if not, the simultaneous increas in Forbidden Teachings will raise your apperent Self rating with all the other members of that clique... Which may balance everything out in the end.

Thomas

Dan, it looks like the Self mechanics are the next thing that's going to get a major overhaul, because (as you and Eero both pointed out) right now they don't make that much sense as a unified mechanic. It struck me yesterday that what are is, more or less, a version of Nobilis' Bonds mechanic given increased narrative potency. You invest Self in things that you care about and then, when they are threatened, you have to defend them or risk losing Self. So what does investing Self do for you?

Here's an odd idea that struck me recently: what if Self only aids you when things you've invested Self in come to your aid? For example, if you invest Self in your Dad and he comes to help you against the bullies, you get your invested Self in a bonus when confronting the bullies with your Dad. In Vesperteen, bringing along a baseball bat isn't going to help you in a fight, since all fights are based on force of personality and not what kind of weapons you have. However, if it's your mother's baseball bat from when she played shortstop on the Parson County High Varsity team (defying those who said that girls weren't good enough to do that), you get all the Self you have invested in it when you ram it through the vampire's heart. However, if someone steals your mom's bat, you have to try to get it back or lose that Self.

Characters in Vesperteen, then, would become much more than a collection of Sins. They're also a collection of relationships that describe the things they care about. Things that they have to protect or lose little bits of themself, but things that also strengthen them and give them courage. Wow, this is sounding like high school wuxia now. Everything I write ends up being wuxia! :)

Smerf, I'm not quite sure I agree with your reasoning. If Self is just your investment in other people and things, I don't see how burning you friends (or burning your mom's prize bat) would allow you to keep that Self. I think you just have to write it off as the price paid for power.

Losing Self? That's when you are unable to protect the things you care about. Your enemies go after you by destroying the things you've invested Self in. All Self has to be invested in something, it doesn't just sit around. Your sense of Self is based on your ability to stand up for what you believe in against the evils of the world. If someone manages to kick you ass and break mom's bat in two, you lose Self. If you have Self invested in your appearance or abilities, and someone shows you up or makes you fail, you lose the invested Self. People with low Self, with few attachments, few things to be passionate about, are like shells. Like someone (Ben? Tony?) said, they work at your local indie video store and rent movies to people sexier and more successful than they are. Or, if you break someone, if you destroy their last point of Self, they might just give into Sin and become a monster forever.

Gaining Self? You gain Self when you triumph in a conflict due to the things you care about. If your dad helps you beat up the bullies, if your drive mom's bat through the vampire's undead heart and it turns to ash, you gain a point of Self, which you must immediately invest in something else (preferrably something related to the conflict that just took place).

How that?

Note to self: don't ever try to get help on a design project during the holiday season. Well, in the absence of comments (which I hope it due to Christmas and such, and not because I've headed off in an uninteresting direction), I'm just going to keep throwing my ideas down and trying to address some of the concerns brought up above.

So, Self is starting to look more like Sin: every point of Sin is something bad you did, some rule or social norm that you broke during a Lesson, and every point of Self is something or someone that you care about, something that supports you, but also a potential weakness to be exploited.

But Sin was originally supposed to act like Self in situations where cliques are involved. You can always count on your fellow Goths or fellow Jocks or whatever to get your back. In fact, that's part of the reason cliques exist at all, for mutual defense. The question, then, is WHY cliques defend each other? If something bad happens to an individual, does it affect the entire clique in some way, the way Self investments involve your friends in your problems? How do we make Sin connect you to people in unhealthy-but-mutually-dependant ways? And when does the cloque decide (like it will inevitably do sometimes) that your problems aren't their problems, leaving you all on your own? Can people work to destroy your ties to your clique, isolating you the way they can by going after your friends?

Well, since cliques don't really care about you (except for a few members of the group who might actually share Self investments), I think they shoudl help you as long as they still want something from you. As long as you're useful to the clique, you're protected. How are you useful? Well, they might want you for your connections with other people or cliques. They might want you as their agent to be used in one of the ongoing struggles. They might want you so you can teach them Lessons in Sins that they are ignorant in.

Are these just Self investments? Would members of the clique invest Self in, say, a particular plot that they needed your help to complete, and then be forced to come to your aid or give up on the plot? Maybe someone has Self invested in Get Revenge on Jimmy Jenkins and you're their current MO or something. But Sin should also tie a group together, right? I mean, you keep pushing each other to higher and higher levels of Sin, working up the clique hierarchy until you command the roost. In this way, you Sin level is also a rank in the clique. Those with 6's in a particular Sin rule their factions like Kings and Queens, just one step removed from the monsters themselves. So maybe, while Self investments are egalitarian and mutual, the ties of Sin are necessarily hierarchical.

Here's a thought: what if joining a clique means investing Self in the clique itself, its ideals and what it represents. Then, once you join a clique, you're a member of the Sin-based hierarchy. And then, if you try to defy the hierarchy and take out members of the clique who rank above you, they can draw on their clique-based Self investment to use against you, since the hierarchy of the clique backs their side. So the investment in the hierarchy is then the only thing that really makes sure the hierarchy works. And only truly worthy up-and-comers are able to take out/replace those above them, since those in power have an advantage. Also, with the required Self investment, all members of a clique are thereby required to support everything that the clique stands for.

This also opens the door for group-creation that might challange established cliques, just by drawing people together and getting them to invest in a particular ideal or course of action. There would be the big cliques centered around specific Sins, or possibly hybrid groups based on multiple Sins, depending on their nature of your high school. Maybe you want to distingish the hardcore rap boyz from the metalheads, making the boyz Greed/Wrath nuts while the metalheads are more Sloth/Wrath.

This would let you customize things a bit, and also allow for cliques to rise and fall as people began taking out their members or assaulting people's investment in the hierarchy. You kidnap a bunch of one clique's members, drag them into the woods under the protection of your monsters, and dare their fellows to do anything about it. You make people feel like the clique isn't able to protect them, and they'll leave to look for people who do have the power to look after them.

Wow. I'm really liking that. Self investment is everything, even forming the foundation of the twisted clique relationships. Now we just have to make sure that this doesn't overshadow Sin as the major player in the field. Maybe the bonuses from Self investments should be capped at 3, so you can only ever get a +3 in a conflict, meaning that getting higher levels of Sin will still let you win out, assuming you have some friends on your side.

Well, that's a fair bit for now. Maybe tomorrow I'll try tackling Lessons or the rules for constructing consequences.

Jonathan Walton wrote: If something bad happens to an individual, does it affect the entire clique in some way, the way Self investments involve your friends in your problems? How do we make Sin connect you to people in unhealthy-but-mutually-dependant ways?

First off, I don't like the idea of capping Self bonuses. I really, really like the idea that you can have a massively powerful tool that is also a huge liability. Sure you can invest 9 or 10 Self in your Girlfriend, but if someone manages to break you up it's going to hurt.

With that in mind you probable need to codify rules that govern increase and decrease in Self investments. You probably don't want let people just raise Self investments however they want, but you do want them to be able to raise them. As to decreasing Self investments, it does happen in real life, but it may not be necessary to have a set of rules governing that. Perhaps you can reduce Self investment by any amount at any time, but it's just as if you lost a tie of that size. So if you wanted to go from 9 Self in your girlfriend to 5 Self, you would lose 4 Self, just as if you had lost a 4 Self investment.

I really like Tony's idea that Sin can be used to mitigate Self loss in some way. I'm not sure exactly what that should look like, but the ability to deflect attacks onto other people is really cool.

I also think that the Sins should be very broadly applicable. That is, you should be able to use that 3 in Lust as a bonus even if you don't have an appropriate Self relationship for a given situation. Sin should almost always be useful.

One other interesting idea: You can not have Self invested greater than your current store of Self. So if you lose a big relationship and your Self crashes, you should also have to lower all other Self investments so that none are higher than your new current Self. Therefore a person with only 1 Self left can not have any Self investments greater than 1.

Further thoughts: Vesperteen may be a good candidate for a "win condition". My guess is that at some level of Self you are essentially unassailable, a mature adult in high school so to speak. it may be a ridiculous number like 100, or it may be something like 15, we probably won't know until we get more stuff down in terms of mechanics. Anyway, that's something to consider.

Thomas

Jonathan Walton wrote:
Here's a thought: what if joining a clique means investing Self in the clique itself, its ideals and what it represents. Then, once you join a clique, you're a member of the Sin-based hierarchy. And then, if you try to defy the hierarchy and take out members of the clique who rank above you, they can draw on their clique-based Self investment to use against you, since the hierarchy of the clique backs their side. So the investment in the hierarchy is then the only thing that really makes sure the hierarchy works.

Jonathan Walton wrote: Note to self: don't ever try to get help on a design project during the holiday season. Well, in the absence of comments (which I hope it due to Christmas and such, and not because I've headed off in an uninteresting direction), I'm just going to keep throwing my ideas down and trying to address some of the concerns brought up above.

Jonathan,

You ever play Diplomacy? Your resolution could work a lot like that.

You said:
So, say you roll your dice and the result doesn't come out the way you want. You don't impress the boy you like, the bully punches you in the face, whatever. Or maybe you succeed, but lots of your Self dice come up really low, meaning you're going to lose confidence from the encounter. Not good. This is where Sin comes in. If you are willing to up the ante in the situation, if you are willing to hurt other people to get what you want, you can call on the power of Sin and re-roll a certain number of dice, trying to get a better roll than you currently have. Both players have this option, continuing to up the ante and re-roll to try to get a more perfect score.

---

If your scores were "points you had available" to act, and you simultaneously devoted points to the action, then you could resolve it in a diceless fashion. "Sin" could be the one attribute that can be spent "after the fact". As in, your upping the ante. Who wants to sin more... What's it worth to ya...

Just a thought.

Good thoughts, folks.

TonyLB wrote: Perhaps a person higher in the Sin-hierarchy can foist off the unpleasant rules-effects of their actions on another person.

Smerf wrote: 1. I don't like the idea of capping Self bonuses.
2. rules that govern increase and decrease in Self investments.
3. I also think that the Sins should be very broadly applicable...
4. Self crashes
5. Vesperteen may be a good candidate for a "win condition".

inky wrote: 1. One leader of a clique.
2. They should be able to use the invested Self however they want.
3. I would guess that cliques have some way to increase their Self pool by exemplifying their sin somehow as a group

Eero wrote: Well, actually, it's a combination of "I'm not really interested in that direction" and "Jonathan seems to be doing well on his own".

Gary wrote: You ever play Diplomacy? Your resolution could work a lot like that.

Jonathan Walton wrote:

Eero wrote: Well, actually, it's a combination of "I'm not really interested in that direction" and "Jonathan seems to be doing well on his own".

I'm sorry about the former, but I don't know what I can do about it. In the end, we can only design the games that we want to design, and not those that other people want to play (well, at least if I'm following through on the ideals of creator-owned games). You've been one of the biggest sources of real assistance and encouragement in the process up until this point, and it's unfortunte if the design ends up heading in a direction that you're not as excited about.

4. And then there's the actual Lesson. This is the only part that I'm stumped about. There's all this build up, so something big has to go down here. Maybe the Teacher takes you aside and gives you a personal Lesson, but I guess public Lessons could happen to, especially if you were learning from a person high up in a clique hierarchy. How should this work? Maybe they get you to invest Self in something, an idea, a person, whatever fits the Lesson, and then they destroy it right in front of you, an obvious sign of their superiority and a lesson in the cruelty of the world.

A couple of notes.

It was my understanding that you didn't actually lose Self through investment. I thought that investment represented a risk of loss. So if you have 9 Self then you can invest 9 Self in anything, but if any one of those things were lost then you would lose 9 Self. This prompted my suggestion that Self loss could cascade your investments down.

Additionally, I'm with Eero on this one: Lessons should not be nearly so complex. While I think the idea of terrible and abusive teachers is pretty cool, I think it's important that you can learn Lessons simply by doing. I would take a look at The Burning Wheel for a good way to handle this one. Everytime you attempt to use something to accomplish stuff, take not of the difficulty of the task. Once you have attempted enough things of enough difficulty compared to your current ability (this is on a non-linear scale) then you advance.

So, my read on this is that you should take your really cool stack of Consequences and use that to allow people to advance their Sin simply by commiting Sins. Those two ideas are far more interesting to me than some sort of invested pool of points. Risk is cool, self teaching that is handled by self-assigned "evil" tasks is cool.

Like Eero, I am a bit confused about what exactly this is all supposed to look like. I'm having trouble seeing exactly how your system works, other than the fact that there are cards involved somewhere.

Thomas

LordSmerf wrote: It was my understanding that you didn't actually lose Self through investment. I thought that investment represented a risk of loss. So if you have 9 Self then you can invest 9 Self in anything, but if any one of those things were lost then you would lose 9 Self. This prompted my suggestion that Self loss could cascade your investments down.

Jonathan Walton wrote:
I'm pondering simplifying the process of gaining Sin, but I really like the Teacher aspect and having to go to the monsters to gain the highest levels. I'll get back to you guys on that...

Okay, not off the page yet, so I'm going to keep chugging along, trying to bang this into something that's playtestable, so come January we can really get rolling. Let me see if I can turn my coffee shop notes into something articulate:

So I was thinking about clique creation, and thinking that each clique should have to choose one or two Sins as its virtues of choice, and that you could never invest more Self in a clique's hierarchy than the amount of their associated Sin that you have. So, that way, the King of the Jocks, with Gluttony 6, would have 6 points invested in the clique which he could bring to bear on any matters involving it (which is a hell of a lot of points). This also leads me to wonder if all Self investments should be capped by Sin, but I tend to think not, as that would complicate things. This also limits the ability of low-Sin people to become really involved with cliques, which means they're really only a part of the game at higher levels of Sin, just like the Fraternities in Continuum.

And then I was thinking about this Status Quo thing that most adults have a huge investment in. And I was doing some Mage-like pondering and thinking "hey, isn't the Status Quo just a big clique for adults?" "Sure is." "Then what Sin is the cardinal virtue of the Status Quo?" And the obvious answer was Maturity, but then Maturity isn't one of the Seven Deadlies. But, you know what? Maybe it should be. So right now I'm pondering adding Maturity as another Sin (Maturity makes you more "adult," in the same way Envy makes you more cool). This brings in the possibility of adults (or, at least, some adutls) just being monsters. They turned into monsters by indulging too much in the Sin of Maturity. And that idea just seems really declicious to me. So your teachers and parents and police officers and child molestors or whatever are all just monsters, as alien from the teenage mindset as werewolves and vampires.

So the only non-monsters in the world are children (ala Little Fears) and teenagers (ala Vesperteen) and the few people who manage to have a healthy adulthood (the "cool" old people who aren't just agents of The Man). Speaking of The Man, you know how all the Sins in Little Fears each have a demonic overload who looks over them? Well, maybe the Lord of Maturity is really just The Man himself. His agents are the school principles, military recruitors, drug control officers, bible tumpers, and other similar forces in the world.

And I was thinking about writing consequences, and wondering if something as simple as this would work (where the number is just the level of Sin that you pushed yourself to):

1-2: an inconvenience
3-4: a serious problem
5-6: a nightmare
6+: hell

And I was thinking about pushing Sins in conflicts, and coming up with a set of general guidelines, such as:

Envy falsifies.
Gluttony disgusts.
Greed impoverishes.
Lust sullies.
Pride isolates.
Sloth calcifies.
Wrath destroys.
Maturity debases.

And then having a general chart, ala Nobilis, though I'm not sure what that might look like. I tried creating one for each specific Sin, but the only one I could do easily was Wrath:

1 - outburst
2 - destruction
3 - violence
4 - injury
5 - cruelty
6 - murder

But you could try to generalize from here, as in:

1 - yell a lot
2 - break something someone cares about
3 - hurt someone's feelings/body
4 - injure someone's feelings/body
5 - cruelly injure someone's feelings/body
6 - totally destroy someone's psyche/body

But that still doesn't look all that appetizing to me.

Still I was also thinking that you could increase things still further by sacrificing Self investments. So if you have a 3 Self investment in your girlfriend and you totally destroy that relationship in the process of winning a conflict, you gain +3 to whatever you're doing, in addition to any crimes of passion that you commit. This would let you sacrifice the things you care about for temporary gains, which I think should be an important aspect of the game.

And then I was thinking about the attraction of Maturity and selling out to the adults (and the adult monsters), and thinking that maybe Maturity (out of all the Sins) would actually give you real world benefits for choosing to resolve conflicts that way, by debasing yourself before the power of The Man. For example, if someone is giving you a hard time and you go to the principle about it, you gain some sort of benefits or status from the adult world. Like maybe you get good grades or get a nice letter written home to your parents or something.

And I'm thinking of dropping all the Sin requirements except the first one, just gaining enough consequences to equal the amount of Sin that you want to have. This way you can gain Sin quickly by trying hard, but it will also be something inevitable, unless you just want to keep getting squished under the boots of people who are willing to do shitty things to you. I think the teacher-student thing and the "do something bad for me" parts might still be retained though, but as part of a kind of arcane magic system, where certain rituals are passed down from the monsters to the cliques and they can use them to basically take Director Stance and make major changes to the narrative environment (like bring someone back from the dead, change events that have already happened, or set up opportune situations). Of course, the adults have their own evil magic, based on Maturity (hello, Technocracy!).

And those are my thoughts recently, which move this thing a few steps closer to being playable. Thoughts?

Jonathan Walton wrote:
And those are my thoughts recently, which move this thing a few steps closer to being playable. Thoughts?

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Well, yeah. I'm coming up as a horrible naysayer, but just disregard to taste. Or, if you feel that negative vibes are unhelpful at this stage, tell me to shut up.

Compare with the earlier conception, where a central question of the game was: What part does sin have in my adulthood? The ambivalency recedes further and further with these classifications of moral condition.

The numeric value of the consequence defines how many points of invested Self are put to risk in a follow-up conflict/something.

Sins in conflicts: you don't necessarily need an objective set of guidelines as long as you require the next act to be worse than the previous one.

Jonathan Walton wrote:
I guess I'm struggling with how to keep the moral ambivilency with systematic and setting elegance. I like having (at least) some adults be systematically defined as "monsters" even if they don't turn into giant, hairy beasts. I like the simplicity of having adults be another splat, but you're right that it destroys much of the thematic potency. I'll keep thinking about this.

Nice solution, Eero.

Also, just talked with Shreyas and he helped me nail a solution to the consequences + scene framing issue.

You build up consequences points during conflicts by overextending yourself and these, in turn, are given to the other players, who spend them to make your life miserable and frame follow-up conflicts. Not sure how this'll happen yet, but I like the idea.