So I'm not even sure if you want this, but read my caveats in the Pre-Planning thread and take a look.


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PUSHing Mechanics:

All for One: a game of Musketeers for three or more players

This system is based off of Vincent Baker’s Otherkind dice and uses ideas from Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures and Ben Lehman’s Polaris, as well as ideas about player contributions and end games developed at the Forge and elsewhere.

Setup

You are all Musketeers, on a mission for the King, the Queen, the Cardinal, or the Captain of the Musketeers. If you’ve read Dumas, or even seen the movies, you know the drill. Talk together and pick (and write down):
• Who the mission is for (eg for the Queen).
• What its goal is (retrieve the diamond necklace).
• Who the mission is aimed against (the Cardinal).
Now make characters, taking this into account.

Characters

As well as the overall mission, each player has a character a goal, a fate and three traits. A name would be nice too.

Goal: Write down something else the character also wants to see happen which is not directly contradict the main goal but requires extra effort to achieve (Gain a place in the Musketeers).

Fate: Write down something that the character wants to avoid happening to him/herself or to others during the adventure (Avoid losing the love of Mlle Bonacieux).

(Note that these two options are essentially mirror images of each other—a fate is negative inverse of a goal, so it is alright to have two of one instead of one of each.)

Traits: Jot down three traits: cunning, suave, brilliant swordsman, strong, member of a secret society. You may use each of these traits once during the game to add a white die to a roll, either by themselves or by someone else, in an appropriate situation

During the game, each player has the opportunity to accumulate disaster dice.

Disaster: Characters can gain disaster dice (black), which are held until end game.

System

Each player should have, or share a set of three non-black or white dice (d6s) for making basic rolls. You will also need bunch of white and black dice and three bowls: obstacles, victories and reserve.

Obstacles: Put one black die in the obstacles bowl for each player, or more—this is the number that controls how long the session will take, so if it is too easy change this. For each die write down on a sheet a thing or person that stands in the way of the mission (e.g. the Cardinal’s Guard, the English Channel, Rochefort, Milady). During their turn a player may opt to take a black die from the obstacles bowl and roll it with the rest of their dice. Those dice are then returned to the reserve.

Victory: The victory bowl holds white dice and starts empty. During another player’s turn, a player may take a die from the victory bowl and give it to the active player to roll with his or her dice. Once used the die is returned to the reserves. (This is almost like Fan Mail in Primetime Adventures, except the dice are used for that roll rather than saved for later.)

Reserve: The reserve holds both black and white dice when they are not in use in order to avoid confusing them with the dice players accumulate.

Scenes and Resolution:

Players take turns round the table framing scenes in which they progress towards the resolution of their mission. Irrespective of how many of the players characters are present in the scene, their character is the one who will attempt to solve the current problem with help from the others. The players collectively set up the situation as follows:

• The active player chooses an objective—what he aims to achieve in the scene.
• The two players to his or her left each choose a complication—something that could go wrong, for the character and the mission as a whole.
• The next player (or if there are only the three players, the active player again), chooses a benefit—something advantageous that could happen that is not related to the goal of the scene.

The players then put together dice for the roll:

The active player takes:
• The three base dice.
• A black die from the obstacles bowl if she wants it.
• White dice from traits.

The other players add
• White dice from their traits and from the victory bowl.
• A black die from the reserve bowl if they wish to betray their comrade.

The players should explain these dice as they add them—and cross them off lists if they are making any.

The player rolls the accumulated dice, and then assigns four of them to the four categories: objective, two complications, and benefit. All black dice must be assigned to a category (unless there are more than four black dice, in which case the highest are chosen), and then any other dice of the active player’s choice may be used to fill in the remaining categories.

Objective: 1-2 Obstacle, 3-4 No Progress, 5-6 Victory!
Complication: 1-2 Disaster!, 3-4 Obstacle, 5-6 Avoided
Benefit: 1-2 Obstacle, 3-4 No Progress, 5-6 Victory!

After resolution, assign dice from the reserve to the appropriate bowls and places—disaster dice to the active player; obstacle and victory dice to the appropriate bowls. Describe what these dice represent—you may want to write this down.

End Game

When the obstacles bowl is empty at the end of a turn, the players enter end game. Beginning with the next player, each player takes a final turn, in which they must roll to resolve their situation and the mission as a whole. Dice are allocated as usual, but each player must roll all their accumulated disaster dice (black), along with any other dice they add.

Mission: 1-3 Fails at Mission, 4-6 Potential Success
Goal: 1-3 Failure, 4-6 Achieve goal.
Fate: 1-3 Fate comes to pass, 4-6 Fate avoided.
Thwarted!: 1-3 Fails at Mission, 4-6 Potential Success

For the characters to succeed at their mission at least one player must not receive a Fails at Mission result—ie must put a 4-6 die in both Mission and Thwarted! categories. Note that because only one player has to succeed at this criterion each player, except the last has the option of either choosing to achieve success or pushing that responsibility off onto the remaining players. Describe the results, and then if you want rewrite the characters and set out on a new mission.

To my mind, what would make this an interesting PUSH article is, since it's quite short, if you were to add a brief explanatory essay. That is, you'd explain what you're trying to do, what you're pushing and stretching, and how and why this setup accomplishes that. You know, theorize the practice.

I agree with Chris. Alternatively, shovel in some color stuff and make it an exciting read. I read the musketeer novels again last month, so I expected to like the game, but in practice it reads as too dull... we've all seen so many formalistic-narrativistic games that at first glance this looked somewhat run of the mill for me. Might be that I'm just not seeing the new and revolutionary stuff in there.

One way of expanding and explifying would be to add a fictionary play account as a teaching tool. What'd make it interesting would be if you wrote
a) the fictionary example
b) the rules
c) the theory
side by side, so that all three are tied together. That's something we've seen discussed at the Forge lately, so I'd like seeing if it's possible in practice.

Reading back over the thing, I absolutely agree--it does read as dry as dust. Bear in mind that I wrote this in four hours from almost a standing start, and the aim was to get the mechanics nailed so that it could be played with no confusion, rather than anything else. It really does need something wrapped around it.

As to if there is anything really new here, it really is just an application of some of the things that are bouncing around in recent games and over on anyway to the Otherkind mechanic. Right now it is probably too formalistic to have quite the flexiblity that it might need, but of course we won't know how it really runs until it gets some playtesting.

So, in the light of Eero and Chris' comments I could do one of three things from here:

1) Put in some minor explanatory examples and a bit of colour, but keep it fairly short so we can use it as a "sidebar game"--not much to it, but a free game in 1,500 words.

2) The above, plus separate out the original Otherkind mechanic and then discuss how (and why) I've gone from the original mechanic to the new game.

3) Eero's suggestion: the above together with a fictional play account.

Thoughts?

I know exactly how it is, I make a lot of these kinds of games, too. What would perhaps be interesting is taking it for a drive and writing about that. I'll add a couple of veins to the ones I already suggested:
a) instead of a fictionary example, test the game for real; concentrate on the actual people, the points of rules contact and the explanation of rules. This is interesting, because the formalistic-type games necessitate a somewhat different frame of mind than the traditional ones (issues of play preparation and stance differ in major ways). The game could work as a pedagogic example on what things are easy and what hard for actual play. Also, compare and contrast with Chris' plan for a thick-descripted play session (somewhere on this forum, if memory serves). Why not use this game for that?
d) write about the method and manner of designing this kind of game. I know that in my case it all begins with analysis of the literary memes in the source literature, but how about you? And after recognizing the forces at work, what happens then? How mechanics are chosen? That kind of practical design stuff gets only rarely any kind of serious write-up, so it's a valuable topic.
e) write a a re-analysis of the structure you have in the game: what parts it's made of and how they interact. Introduce each separate idea in isolation, and show how they interact to make a complete game. This is an interesting and important topic because many designers really have only a vague understanding of what all those forgites mean by planning the design and considering the unity. And the game here seems pretty well suited for this kind of analysis, being that there's easily recognizable stuff in there.

Although the game as presented might be a little dull, there are all kinds of directions you can PUSH the article to make it interesting. Pick some, or do a little bit of all. And ask a couple of guys here to help with parts... it's easy to make it interesting even without revamping the game itself. So my suggestion is that you should pick the directions that interest you and embed the game (more or less as it is) in an article that uses it to address larger issues.

This article overlaps a lot with my proposed "outline of Polaris's narration mechanics" article. And, honestly, that's fine by me. I was having trouble writing it in the first place.

Jon, I've got a bunch of other things I could write, too. Let me know.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben,

I don't want to get in the way of your article if you are already well into it or if you are really excited about doing it. If you are equally happy with doing something else that's all good, but alternatively we could either shelve this for a while, or we could talk over what you were going to do and see if we could come up with a way your article and this one could work as complements to each other--working out different aspects of the same thing.

Piers

Dudes, part of the reason we're building this stuff collectively instead of writing articles individually is so everything fits together. You can even reference other articles in the same issue of the journal if you like (we have lots of stuff already on the theme of GMless play: our wuxia game, Polaris, Emily's article; themes are good!).

Take this stuff to PM or discuss it here and see if you guys can figure out who's going to do what or if you want to collaborate on an article. Whatever you guys end up deciding is probably fine with me. Just send me a message, running the final plan by me and letting me know what's going on.

I'm the middle man and the enabler here, not the taskmaster (well, until it comes down to deadline time...).