Topic: There and Back: a meta-system
Started by: Clinton R. Nixon
Started on: 2/22/2002
Board: Indie Game Design
On 2/22/2002 at 9:08pm, Clinton R. Nixon wrote:
There and Back: a meta-system
A couple of months ago, I created a quick meta-system in these forums as a response to the Cheating Death thread in Indie Game Design. The goal was to provide a system to (a) allow players to continue to contribute after character death and (b) allow for non-linear co-authorship of a game.
I've now edited that system, and published it in Alarums and Excursions, as well as put it up for anyone to read and comment.
The system can be found at http://www.anvilwerks.com/rpg/. I'm interested to here if people think this would work well with most games.
Forge Reference Links:
Topic 1079
On 2/22/2002 at 9:56pm, Emily Care wrote:
RE: There and Back: a meta-system
Competitive narrative sharing. Excellent thinking!
An obvious question:
Characters above and beyond the one-player-one-character allotment listed in the rules, you know, "npc's"--do they shift into the control of each incoming gm?
A meta-game concern: if not all the players know the system in use well enough to run it, then the bidding will be limited to whomever "owns the books" etc. Simpler systems might work better for the meta-system, depending on the group.
--Emily Care
On 2/23/2002 at 4:30pm, Kenway wrote:
RE: There and Back: a meta-system
This system reminds me of both SOAP by Crayne and OHNE by Bulletshower:
http://www.landshut.org/bnla01/members/BulletShower/ohnerule.htm
I also remember reading somebody's idea of a GM-less rpg: each player takes turns GMing for 5 minutes.
On 2/25/2002 at 4:21pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: There and Back: a meta-system
Hi Clinton,
Finally I get a chance to work on this. I like a lot of things about it, but it brings up a complex issue.
I'm finding it hard to express why competitive mechanics and Narrativist ideals sometimes work well, and sometimes work badly.
Part of the problem is that both competition and mutualism belong to the larger category of social "participation," and when the competition is leisure-based rather than crucial to life & limb, it even may be called a sub-set of cooperation.
All of which is a long-winded way to say, "Be careful with using competitive mechanics to 'motor' Narrativist goals. They tend to take over or be ignored."
Case in point: I have played Soap with continual bidding and with no bidding at all. Neither of these were "agreed upon" beforehand, but simply arose from the
Now at first glance, we say, "Oh, well that's sweet and fine." But I suggest that it's a potential problem if the competitive mechanic is supposed to be a Narrativist motor. In Soap, it's not - the competition is actually more of a band-aid in order for us to know "what happens" and to move on. In Universalis, it kind of is, which is one of the elements of the game which makes me nervous. IE, if no one ever disagrees, then what mechanics "make things go?"
So in There and Back, the question is, which is more fun: stealing scenes from one another (a la Once Upon a Time) or sharing-'round authorship (a la Prince Valiant)? If it's the former, then to hell with all the "make a good story" noise and go to town with the grappling. If it's the latter, then to hell with the bidding/stealing at all and simply enjoy the "trading of the conch," so to speak, with Story Points as metagame modifiers to the "real" game and nothing else.
So much for bidding mechanics. The same point applies, in a different way, to voting mechanics. Bluntly, I hate these. Voting in a small group, in which any single vote is a potential tie-breaker, is a terrible way to establish policy. Personal alliances (and most importantly, sympathies) outweigh other considerations every time.
The Story Point increase-mechanics in There and Back are not really votes, though - they are payments. However, as they are payments from an infinite pool, I predict two outcomes - a given player either gives out the minimum every time, or the maximum every time, with the latter being more likely.
Best,
Ron
On 2/25/2002 at 10:16pm, Mike Holmes wrote:
RE: There and Back: a meta-system
Ron Edwards wrote:
... I suggest that it's a potential problem if the competitive mechanic is supposed to be a Narrativist motor. In Soap, it's not - the competition is actually more of a band-aid in order for us to know "what happens" and to move on. In Universalis, it kind of is, which is one of the elements of the game which makes me nervous. IE, if no one ever disagrees, then what mechanics "make things go?"
Excellent. Yes, what indeed? Not too long ago I encountered just that situation. Our solution was to tweak the mechanics so that there was a reward for disagreeing, essentially. I like how this has turned out, because it reinforces our design goal of the mechanics promoting story creation through collision, a synthesis if you will. In this way it is like Pantheon, a Gamist game around which the competition is to get power to tell a story.
But there's that extra layer there. It's not a Gamist game where a story occurs accidentally, as a product of play. The only thing to spend your Gamist rewards on in Universalis are story producing mechanics (one could just create stuff, I suppose...) and other mechanics enforce the idea that the story should be good. So, it's really not all that far from The Pool, in which there is a sort of Gamist mechanic, but the reward can only be used to tell a good story.
At least that's the theory.
So in There and Back, the question is, which is more fun: stealing scenes from one another (a la Once Upon a Time) or sharing-'round authorship (a la Prince Valiant)? If it's the former, then to hell with all the "make a good story" noise and go to town with the grappling. If it's the latter, then to hell with the bidding/stealing at all and simply enjoy the "trading of the conch," so to speak, with Story Points as metagame modifiers to the "real" game and nothing else.
Hm. Well, the idea with the bidding is that a player who has a good idea will be more motivated to get it out. So by allowing such a bid you allow better story to be told if a player is willing to back up their faith in the fact that it might be better with currency. If a player really does not have a better idea, why would he bother biding? The same might apply to There and Back.
So much for bidding mechanics. The same point applies, in a different way, to voting mechanics. Bluntly, I hate these. Voting in a small group, in which any single vote is a potential tie-breaker, is a terrible way to establish policy. Personal alliances (and most importantly, sympathies) outweigh other considerations every time.
This is something that we might have to consider.
OTOH, our voting is not "single vote tie-breaker" in Complications, only in Challenges (forgive my use of potentially unfamiliar Universalis terminology, for those who have not seen it). Challenges are intended to deter "bad" play, for the most part. The hope is that they will be used rarely, that the threat of their use will keep players thinking in terms of producing a story that fits any guidelines set by the group. And there are arbitration rules set up to again prevent it from ever needing to get to a vote. Because, yes, a final vote like that is something to be avoided. Given the circumstances under which a challenge can occur in Universalis, however, even those that get to that point have a certain weight that makes a player wary of using them for personal agendas. This has been the case in my playtests, at least. I usually see only about two or three challenges a session and about every other session one of them comes to a vote. The sort of mini trial that occurs means that the voting has seemed to me to be very honest.
The above is to give an idea of our design philosophy. I'm hoping to find out in playtest whether or not these things bear true for others. One test recently had problems with this sort of thing, so perhaps it is something that needs a fix. We had considered (on a suggestion from Scott Knipe) making challenges an add-on. It might not be necessary at all in a group that has such implicit trust that they don't ever worry about having to reel a player back in. OTOH, then they would not use the mechanic anyhow, and it does little harm to have it there just in case. Round and round.
Mike
On 2/26/2002 at 7:16pm, Clinton R. Nixon wrote:
Designer-player trust
Mike - man, what are you going on about? I don't get it. (I assume it's Universalis. I've seen it, and Ron's seen it, but the rest of the Forge as a whole hasn't. Discuss it privately, or show it publicly. You honestly side-tracked this thread so much that I haven't wanted to continue the discussion.)
Ron Edwards wrote:
So in There and Back, the question is, which is more fun: stealing scenes from one another (a la Once Upon a Time) or sharing-'round authorship (a la Prince Valiant)? If it's the former, then to hell with all the "make a good story" noise and go to town with the grappling. If it's the latter, then to hell with the bidding/stealing at all and simply enjoy the "trading of the conch," so to speak, with Story Points as metagame modifiers to the "real" game and nothing else.
The bidding/voting mechanics in "There and Back" were put in so that one person could not run the story however he wanted - if his stories were terrible, he would eventually run out of Story Points.
That was the wrong way to do things.
Jared Sorensen and I had a private discussion yesterday where the concept of "designer-player trust" came up. Succinctly - many mechanics in modern role-playing games are there because the designer does not trust the players to use the game well. Some games are built around this concept - look at the White Wolf admonishment to not use the rules if they get in the way of the story. Resaid, this attitude is, "These rules are here for you to use if you can't tell a good story on your own."
I've had the same problem in re-writing Donjon - I keep thinking of mechanics to prevent a crazed player from saying, "I find the Soul-Drinking Soul of Blood Magic!" I actually made the mistake several months ago of advising Jared to put a mechanic in Inspectres to prevent players from ending the game to early.
The real question is: why do we care? Someone determined to mis-use a system will, no matter how hard the designer tries to stop them. Simultaneously, the rules written to stop one rogue player get in the way of everyone else.
I've now come to the conclusion that rules that reward good behavior are much better than rules that punish bad behavior. In the context of "There and Back," (bringing the discussion full-circle) I think the initial bidding mechanic is flawed. My initial reaction is to change the rules in this way:
- Everyone begins the game with 5 Story Points.
- At the beginning of a session, anyone who wants to run that session proposes his idea in a few sentences. After everyone has spoken, the players vote for their favorite idea. The winner runs the game.
- At any time during the game, a player can propose an idea for a new scene that he wishes to run, and must spend a Story Point. After he proposes that idea, someone must second his motion. If seconded, the new scene is run by the player. If not seconded, the scene is dropped.
- After a session, players score the session with a number between 1 and 10. The average of these scores is presented to the GM as new Story Points.
- There is no scoring after a scene.
I realize there's still some instances of voting here, but in a much more subdued fashion. Does this seem like a better method?
On 2/26/2002 at 7:42pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: There and Back: a meta-system
Clinton,
I think that step 1 still doesn't need voting. Just have everyone propose a scenario or whatever, and pick'em out of a hat, or have an open discussion.
Best,
Ron