Hey.

So if you've ever played Primetime Adventures, you know about Budget, which is my response to what I always considered a daunting task as GM, which is providing the right amount of adversity for the player characters. There are very few games that don't leave the amount of toughness totally up to the GM, and I'm thinking that for most games, in all three GNS categories, the wrong amount of adversity can really mess things up. Unfortunately, all you get from most games is some advice that says "this should be about right."

And that seems always to lead to threads about 'oh, damn, I made the villain too powerful and had to fudge a roll."

Of course, as Ron pointed out in an actual play thread, a big part of the trick to combatting tough GM choices in PTA is that there's no consequences on the character sheet. The player sees no reduction in the ability to participate. Vincent did something similar with Dogs. You can be shot to bits and dying, but the effect on your sheet is totally up to you. I think MLwM is kind of like that too.

Okay, but let's say, then, that game conflicts do in fact impose penalties on the sheet in front of you, and no buts about it. Now we're back to "if I misjudge, your ability to shape the story is unfairly impaired."

So after that long setup, here's what this thread's all about: various ways to complete the sentence, "it's functional in play for the GM to assign adversity levels in a game where conflict loss affects character ability if..."

I'll kick it off with this idea that's been rolling around in my head: Character impairment is offset by new temporary abilities for the player. Suppose you lose a conflict like in TSOY and you're down to a -3 penalty. That gives you 3 more gift dice, or it gives you three 'fact tokens' or something.

Any ideas out there?

For completeness sake, I proposed a system in this thread that does the exact same opposite of giving players penalties: it always gives players currency when they let their characters become hurt, persuaded, or seduced. That goes along with what you said about being rewarded for losing a conflict.

As to your question, we could say:
- if the player already has other, equally viable means to shape the story (e.g., player characters are only one way yo play; players can also (use some currency to) negotiate story elements or take control of NPCs, or maybe they play a troupe and can switch characters)
- if what doesn't kill you makes you stronger (reward XP for losing - this is like a Gamist way of auto-adjusting difficulty levels)
- if there are different ways of addressing conflicts through the character and not all of them are affected by the penalty.

What Christian said. Plus:

- If the players have equal power in deciding character effectiveness. If the GM can set any adversity level, but the players can say "yeah, and due to my magic spaceship pilot ninja expertise, I can actually go FTL" and match that level. Easiest done with limited resources on both sides - both GM and players have some sort of Budget, in effect.

-- when the penalty is thematically or genre-wise appropriate.

-- When the penalty plays into some larger design goal.

I'm thinking of The Mountain Witch here. In tMW, the effect of the mechanical penalty incurred by damage has on play is that it decreases the character's already fragile independance. Wounded characters become more and more dependant on other characters helping them out. This dependcy increases the trust-related tension between characters.

Speaking generally, I think its also significant that tMW has mechanics (Trust) that can be used to negate the mechanical penalty inposed by damage.

Hi Matt,

First, I'd also like to note that on the flip side- uncontrolled "bonuses" also can cause disruption- though many more games are fearful/wary of that than of uncontrolled penalties.  Note how many games warn against handing out magical devices or powers, but have no problem handing out penalties.  HeroQuest's "damage" for failing contests without an equivalent for earning bonuses is a pretty clear example.

That said- Penalties work when:

They increase the tension

Trollbabe's injuries reduce the number of rerolls you can apply to a contest, but they also increase the stakes of losing.  L5R's & the Solar System's Wound tracks also increase tension- because each wound level has more than one hit- the tension is increased when you are close to falling into a worse penality (such as being 1 box, or wound away).  Compared to normal hitpoints, where there is no penalties along the way, this works better as a tension device.  And compared to normal wound tracks, it doesn't instantly equate to a death spiral.  Overall, tension is increased whenever the stakes go up (like gambling double or nothing), or when the chance of taking a penalty increases.

They force alternate tactics

When one ability is crippled, having other abilities that can be applied allow folks to start being creative in play.  Both HeroQuest and Dogs are good at this- because you have to get creative to bring in other bonuses (or even "bad traits") in order to maintain effectiveness.

They force game specific goals

As Tim noted, penalties can force actions to make up for it, or you can force actions to heal.  For example, in D&D, the "8 hour rest" becomes necessary as spellcasters use up their resources, mostly as a "just because" mechanic, compared to TSOY's "social kickin' it" way of refreshing pools.  For one game idea I had, I wanted the only means of healing to be through relationships- which is a way of forcing certain kinds of interactions in play.

All that said, the key things that need to be well understood in terms of penalties (or bonuses, currency in general)
- Duration (just once, a pool, for X amount of rolls/time, until remedied, forever)
- Range & Accuracy (makes things harder/easier, makes things impossible/automatic)
- Ease of Negation (make one successful/failed roll, player controlled conditions, GM fiat, no negation possible)
- Options (Decreases/Increases player options?)
- Handling (how hard is it to remember to apply?  How hard is it to calculate? To keep track of?)

Chris

timfire wrote:
I'm thinking of The Mountain Witch here. In tMW, the effect of the mechanical penalty incurred by damage has on play is that it decreases the character's already fragile independance. Wounded characters become more and more dependant on other characters helping them out. This dependcy increases the trust-related tension between characters.

Speaking generally, I think its also significant that tMW has mechanics (Trust) that can be used to negate the mechanical penalty inposed by damage.

Matt wrote:
I like the reasons for applying penalties. I'm all for that. In fact, I want that in my next game. But how do you moderate the GM's ability to inflict those penalties? That's really what I'm after here, control over the level of adversity. What in TMW, for example, keeps the GM from just asking for roll after roll after roll until the player fails? Can the GM assign a difficulty level? If so, what keeps him or her from abusing that, either intentionally or not?

"it's functional in play for the GM to assign adversity levels in a game where conflict loss affects character ability if..."

...there's a floor to how low character ability can go, and that floor preserves some amount of effectiveness.

I think the classic (for Indie games, at least) floor is "you can't kill a character without that players permission." A more traditional one might be that you always get to roll one dice for somethign you have a skill in, or whatever. But I'm sure you could insert a floor, probably in combination with other things mentioned in this thread to serve your design goals - like, spaceship pilots can never lose the ability to fly a spaceship, or something, if thats what yours games about. Or you can't have a lower blowing-up-heads rating than your love-your-mother rating. Or whatever.

I think the key concept here is that the loser of a conflict doesn't lose opportunities to shape play thereafter. The two general ways that come to mind are

1) compensation, which folks have talked about already: when defeated, if you lose some of X, you gain some of Y (e.g. XPs, or story tokens for the loser in Capes)
2) mutation, which I don't think we've addressed particularly: when defeated, you don't lose any X, but X is changed into a form you might not have chosen had you won. (Dogs does this much of the time, though not always). For example, you could go into a battle with the Trait "I am the leader of a mighty army +13" and come out of it with the mechanically equally powerful, but thematically rather different "I am seeking absolution and revenge for the mighty army I led to its annihilation +13." Or "I trust my wife +4" to "I think I'm going to have a serious discussion with the milkman +4."

Which gives me a tiny nubbin of an idea for a "damage system," actually. If you lose a conflict, then you can choose (1) reduce a trait you previously created for your character, which means your character will be less effective - or - (2) let the winner assign your character a trait, which will increase your character's effectiveness but not necessarily in ways you're going to like. (This latter is basically Tony Lower-Basch's Misery Bubblegum design).

Matt wrote: I like the reasons for applying penalties. I'm all for that. In fact, I want that in my next game. But how do you moderate the GM's ability to inflict those penalties? That's really what I'm after here, control over the level of adversity. What in TMW, for example, keeps the GM from just asking for roll after roll after roll until the player fails? Can the GM assign a difficulty level? If so, what keeps him or her from abusing that, either intentionally or not?

xenopulse wrote: - if there are different ways of addressing conflicts through the character and not all of them are affected by the penalty.

I like systems where the GM can take things too far, and the players have some system-supported way of "cheating."

• Sorcerer - self-mastery.
• DitV - set limited Stakes; assign benign or story-enhancing Fallout.
• BW - spend Artha to tweak results.
• TSOY - Gift of Dice; BDTP; spend Pools for bonus dice.
• Universalis - spend Importance worth of tokens to strike Facts from the play log.

You want to see 'em tremble, but not bawl.

Matt wrote: "it's functional in play for the GM to assign adversity levels in a game where conflict loss affects character ability if..."

I tackled this directly as I was working on FH8.  Matthijs said something close to what I did, what with "limited resources on both sides."

So, my response is;

... when the GM has to earn the authority to impose penalties.

In FH8 every NPC, every mob of NPCs, every opposition that the PCs might face always starts with the same exact statistics.  If the GM wants to bump up the power of the opposition he has to spend a resource.  To earn more of that resource he has to provide the players with the opposition that they've asked for. 

While FH8 dosen't have a system that calls for the GM to impose direct penalties on the PCs, I think the idea is the same.  If the GM cannot impose a -X penalty on your roll unless he expends a point of resource for every point that goes into X, AND the GM has to earn those resources by way of giving the players what they want, then you've got functional play.

-Eric

wrote:

The reason the penalty works in tMW is because the players REAL mechanisms for afffecting play---Trust points and character Fates--aren't hindered by the negative penalty. I guess its similar to what xenopulse said:

xenopulse wrote: - if there are different ways of addressing conflicts through the character and not all of them are affected by the penalty.

Is that what you were going for?

Hiya,

I'd like to suggest that The Mountain Witch, Trollbabe, and Primetime Adventures all share a feature which renders the "easy/hard" construction of skill tests in traditional role-playing obsolete. This feature has been an informal part of role-playing for a long time, and I've always used it more-or-less as a litmus for whether I wanted to play with a given group or not.

It can be found as a necessary but unstated assumption in The Pool. If you don't use it in (say) Over the Edge, the game is unplayable. It's an explicit feature in Dust Devils, Universalis, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Hero Wars, and frankly muddled by changes in the latter to HeroQuest.

Which is ... conflicts are settled by rolls. It doesn't matter how much "damage" you take or how "hard" it was, if a character loses, the conflict is resolved against the character's interests.

Further, without the presence of such a conflict-of-interest, there is no roll. At all. You could suggest that your character jumps over a mountain, and the group all looks at you like, "shut up." You could suggest your character fixes the nuclear reactor, and if it's not a conflict in the sense I'm talking about, then he just does 'cause he's a nuclear-fixer guy. Doesn't matter if it's "hard" to do.

At first this might look all loosey-goosey and consensual-story, but it's not. It's actually strictly vicious in practice - always roll when it matters, and eat the roll (relative to other system issues like Currency mods and so forth) once it's made. It's exactly the opposite of the duplicitious Golden Rule of the Storyteller system.

So ... basically, the GM in The Mountain Witch cannot keep throwing oni devils at the player-characters in order to keep them from entering the Witch's castle gate. Because if they win the roll, then that conflict is solved. All narration must abide by the standard that they do, indeed, enter the gate. Hell, the person who narrates might even state that 100 more oni show up and get slaughtered, just as a piece of the narration (these games vary in terms of how much you can add along the way; TMW is quite generous, whereas Trollbabe isn't).

Matt, I think this concept accounts well for your questions. Do I need to parse it out a bit more? I'm thinking maybe that real Actual Play examples are called for.

Best,
Ron

Ron, could you elaborate on how this varies in Hero Wars vs. Hero Quest? I'm familiar with both texts but don't know what you're referring to. It would probably serve to clarify your larger point. (To me, at least.)

Hi Larry,

Difficulty target numbers in Hero Wars struck me as essentially conflict-based in terms of impact on the cultural and magical problems of Glorantha. The more significant the problem, the more Ws are involved. Within each plateau, frankly, the difference between (say) 5 and 15 really isn't a representational issue, more of a "fully in this plateau" or "barely there" indicator.

HeroQuest is marred throughout with a nearly fetish-like fascination with representational scale ("how many masteries in 'large' does an elephant have") and with skill-oriented difficulty. I've written before how infuriating I find the very first system example, when Mr. Puma leaps into a tree to avoid being seen by a merchant ... and the text gets all wrapped up in what the tree rolls based on how big and tall it is.

That is crap. It's crap for all the reasons Matt is discussing in this thread. The real conflict present is between Mr. Puma and the merchant, and should be rolled in that fashion. At most the tree should be an augmenter for one or the other. I blame the resurgence of RuneQuest grognard influence in the development of HeroQuest, which I think did serious damage to the clarity of the text and the game itself.

Best,
Ron

Matt wrote:
Yes! Although I still want to know: can you as GM in TMW choose how hard to make a conflict? Are there such things as "Easy/medium/hard" conflicts? Or is it more like Trollbabe? If you do have that ability, how much control over the game can it give you?

Sydney wrote:
Which gives me a tiny nubbin of an idea for a "damage system," actually. If you lose a conflict, then you can choose (1) reduce a trait you previously created for your character, which means your character will be less effective - or - (2) let the winner assign your character a trait, which will increase your character's effectiveness but not necessarily in ways you're going to like. (This latter is basically Tony Lower-Basch's Misery Bubblegum design).

Cool. I gotta check those out, now. But the thing I was trying to get at was the idea of giving players a choice: take "damage" as reduced effectiveness -- the tradition HP/wound penalty/etc. model -- or as reduced control -- allowing someone else to partially define your character. ("I win, now you care about X!")

Sydney wrote:
Cool. I gotta check those out, now. But the thing I was trying to get at was the idea of giving players a choice: take "damage" as reduced effectiveness -- the tradition HP/wound penalty/etc. model -- or as reduced control -- allowing someone else to partially define your character. ("I win, now you care about X!")

wrote: Matt, I think this concept accounts well for your questions. Do I need to parse it out a bit more? I'm thinking maybe that real Actual Play examples are called for.

But here's what's still missing: in HeroQuest or Hero Wars or hell a ton of games out there, what keeps you from making the roll in the first place exceedingly hard? Why not make every roll exceedingly hard?

Hi Matt,

I agree with you, and I think it comes down to a much larger question of where "scenes" come from and where "conflict" comes from - in terms of real people talking. The issue of "difficulty" (making the roll hard) is an artifact of how these things are constructed in traditional role-playing, and once you alter the basic ("meta," whatever) system, this issue tends to dry up and blow away.

If I do say so myself, I think Trollbabe solves the problem by specifying who says scenes start and stop, and who says conflicts begin. For those of you who know the game, you know that both of these are (a) formalized and (b) rather nuanced in practice, within the formalization.

There are certainly other solutions, such as the turn-order approach taken by Universalis, Capes, and PTA. These work as well or better, despite intense gamer-culture resistance to the idea of "taking turns."

The one really painful feature of Sorcerer's current system is that whole "roll against however many dice the GM feels like" part, when an opposing character is not specified. Vincent solved this neatly in Dogs by calling this roll "the demons" and assigning it a fixed amount - a sneaky and effective feature which eludes most users' understanding, if the Actual Play posts are anything to go by (they keep thinking he's talking about, you know, demons). In practice, when playing Sorcerer, I usually use 1-3 dice, which isn't much, for such rolls, essentially mimicking Vincent's solution informally. Also, such rolls are very rare, because they must be real conflicts but other characters are not involved.

I think this'll be a big discussion topic at GenCon this year. I even have a diagram which might help, but it works best in real-people conversation.

Best,
Ron

Matt wrote:
The players have to have a resource at their disposal that, as Vincent says, makes it so that the GM doesn't have to pull punches. Make the difficulty a million, and give the players the opportunity to play a veto card, or allow the GM to make it a 10^6 difficulty only once per game session. That's what I'm after.

Ron:

Cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to beer + that topic.

Gareth:

So, why not simply automate the whole process and use the GM purely as an animator-come-administrator of what amounts to system-generated opposition.

Gareth - there is a big 'what's the GM for' issue that comes up here.

But I don't agree with you that good GM constraints on providing conflict/adversity/opposition render the GM role meaningless. On the contrary, I find these rules really, really liberating as GM, at least taking Dogs as my example. Because when you don't have these rules, when you leave it to 'judgment', the GM is effectively playing against himself, and has to ask all these questions about what's 'fair' and 'realistic' (get thee behind me, Satan!) in order to give the players a fun time. It's a big hassle. Even when you do a good job, maybe your monster rolls a crit in the final encounter, and then you're like 'gosh, should I have used an Ogre? Was I being a dick or was that fair?'

If the system does that for you you can ask the question about whether the system provides a good level of adversity or not and how instead, letting yourself enjoy playing the game in play.

Brainstorming, eh? Here are some half-baked ideas I've come up with while reading this thread:

Difficulty cards. The GM draws a hand of cards with "difficulty" numbers each session. (e.g. 1,1,2,1,2,1,1,5,3,1) He can play any of these he chooses when the players face a conflict. Similar to PTA's budget, but a different tactile approach.

GM-less auto-cards. As above, except cards are drawn from a face-down deck.

GM-less Plot path. There is a FIXED sequence of "difficulties," probably corresponding to rising interest-climax-resolution.

Chrono path. As plot path, but defined by real-time moments during the game session. (e.g. everything becomes "climax" difficulty forty minutes before the end of the session)

Where I use "difficulty," I'm developing a vague awareness of the concept Ron is describing, but do not yet grok. I may just need to play more of the games referenced.

In Verge, players set the difficulty themselves, based entirely on the amount of risk they're willing to take on. The player rolls his dice, and the GM rolls the risk dice the players gave him.

Then if the player wins the conflict, the player rolls his dice again and the GM rolls his dice again, and the difference is the player's reward -- except that it's reversed. That is, the GM's dice margin of success (MOS) minus the player's MOS is the reward.

The more risk the player takes ("gives" is more accurate), the more rewards the player gets. The GM never sets the risk level for any conflict.

Hello,

With regards to assigning difficulties, as a GM, I hate the traditional GM task procedure of first having to assign a difficulty value for a given task/foe, then deciding how bad the effects are and then how long they'll last afterward. And in the middle, I'm second guessing and riding herd on the dice to make sure it doesn't break the game. This is a balance of power that, to me, translates down into: by virtue of my traits and skills, the GM says that I win or lose. So, like the original poster, I've been seeking alternatives to the one-sided balance of power. Many alternatives are unusable given my particular group's preferences. I can't stray too far from traditional gaming, though there are a wealth of things that could be tried.

So I'm going to try the option presented in SteveD's There is No Spoon (and also There is No Try, There is No Yellow Spandex, etc) where the diff is the pc's relevant stat. (aka the roll-under option.) With apologies to those who've already seen it...In a nutshell, if you want to make a perception check to pick out the north star, you just roll vs your perc stat (with no bonuses or penalties.)

(There's no penalty for thick clouds and no bonus for clear skies. If you can't see it or you wouldn't know which one it was, there's no point rolling.) To resolve a roll, you look at the kinds of successes indicated by the dice; which tells the strength of result and you narrate according to social contract expectations, genre, etc. Any opposed rolls each have their success levels compared and likes cancel. One side will have more successes of some kind than the other and you narrate a flurry of action and then the final result.

The point to all that was that the diff is built right into the trait in the first place. A 3 trait on a d6 is a 50-50 outcome. So your trait IS your balance of power in that area. If your GM is undeservedly throwing foes at you who are consistently (say) twice your ability level, then you'll know it. There's no need for a meta-mechanic to keep things on a certain budget or within a certain genre/expectation besides discussion and agreement (aside: nothing wrong meta's...my group just doesn't like that sort of mechanic.)

Caveat: Seems like it'll work good for us but I have yet to playtest it. I haven't heard anything bad from anyone who's tried the original system...(insert evil laugh) but of course, I have adapted it a bit from SteveD's original.

Spawky

Ron wrote:
That is crap. It's crap for all the reasons Matt is discussing in this thread. The real conflict present is between Mr. Puma and the merchant, and should be rolled in that fashion. At most the tree should be an augmenter for one or the other. I blame the resurgence of RuneQuest grognard influence in the development of HeroQuest, which I think did serious damage to the clarity of the text and the game itself.

For Danger Patrol, I'm doing three things to address this issue:

1) What's done is done. Conflicts are settled by the system. No one player can force another to test again and again until they fail.

2) Pre-made characters. All of the heroes and villains for the current series are made cooperatively by the group before play begins. So all those "difficulty numbers" are set at that time.

3) Random characters. Before each chapter in the series, the heroes and villains go into a pile and everyone draws blind for a character. The hero your villain hosed last chapter just might be your character now.

Imagine a game of Dogs without a formal GM where the group as a whole sits down and makes the town, the townspeople, and the Dogs, draws to see who plays what, and then goes to it. That's kind of what I'm after. I think it sidesteps the issue of "too much responsibilty" when being a GM.

We appear to be offering examples of systems that determine how difficult the referee is allowed to make a situation, so let me toss Multiverser's General Effects Rolls into the mix.

The primary use of these rolls is to guide the referee in understanding outcomes where resolved actions don't necessarily answer that question. A popular example is a character who on encountering a local population fires a gun into the air, hoping that the loud noise will have some desired effect. Given the game's task-based resolution mechanic for character actions, I can resolve whether in fact he can fire the gun into the air; but how do I know the reaction of the natives?  I roll a GE roll.  At the one end, the outcome is stated to be far better than anything the character could have hoped; at the other end, it's far worse than he might have feared. Along the range between we find varying degrees including a neutral point. Based on that roll, I as referee determine what happens based on my perception of what the player through his character wishes would happen.

The same process is frequently used in scenarios. In a game situation yesterday, it had been established that armed soldiers were searching the countryside for the player character, and that one of them had come to the door of the house where he was staying. When he decided he wanted to dive into this as a battle rather than try to escape, I used a general effects roll to determine how many soldiers were going to hear the gunfire of the fight and respond, knowing that he wants it to be enough that it will be a wild battle but not so many that he's guaranteed to lose.

Since the question your posing seems to be very much on the order of how the referee fills in the unwritten parts of the scenario, that would be how Multiverser would handle it. It would be entirely different if the player decided to free a comrade from prison, and I had already determined how many guards were at the prison and how they were organized.  In that case, GE rolls might impact enemy organization and response time, but not numbers and abilities.

Does that fit your thoughts?

--M. J. Young

Interesting, MJ. I used to do something similar when I ran Godlike to represent the factor known as "friction" in special forces speak.

How is a GE roll made? Is it an unmodified die roll? If there are modifiers that skew the result one way or the other, who is responsible for applying those modifiers? Are there any system checks on the person applying the modifiers or when a GE roll can be made? Is scale part of the system (as in, how "big" the effect of a GE roll is -- one person or a whole tribe)?

Sorry for the rapid-fire questions, but I'm curious.

John wrote: How is a GE roll made? Is it an unmodified die roll? If there are modifiers that skew the result one way or the other, who is responsible for applying those modifiers? Are there any system checks on the person applying the modifiers or when a GE roll can be made? Is scale part of the system (as in, how "big" the effect of a GE roll is -- one person or a whole tribe)?