Several things I've read and written lately have collided in my brain, spawning an idea of a game. I usually get random ideas that don't go beyond a set of notes, but this time I'd like to push harder and actually produce something. The result will be a pdf, and we'll see if I'll be proud enough to charge people for it (this is something I would really like to do some day).

One design goal is that I want a fast-paced game where the players will have to choose between the welfare of their characters and the welfare of the jointly owned tavern. Another goal is that I want the players to complicate rather than dismiss. I want them to add stuff that makes the situation more complicated, and I want this to lead to higher rewards, instead of solving things in the easiest and quickest possible way. I also want every player to engage in everything that's going on, even if their own character isn't present.

I have lots of problems, of course, but my main question in this thread is how to involve players not in the scene in an engaging way. I'll start with a brief description of the game.

The working title is "The Tavern", and the game will be about a group of characters who co-owns and runs a tavern in an unnamed fantasy city. The game won't have a detailed setting, so anything the group wants to include (trolls, airships, steam-punk elements, knights) can be included. I'll sprinkle the game text with suggestive names and occurrences and let the group use them as they like.

The characters will take on different responsibilities in this tavern, from being the cook to handling the stable. The important thing is that they all own an equal part of the tavern, so it's they'll have to work together to handle it. I think characters will be a set of some basic attributes (perhaps three: physical, mental and social), tavern-related traits ("Handling customers", "Taking care of horses") and relationships. They'll all be rated between 1 and 6, or something, and will signify how many d6:es you roll in conflicts that relate to it.

I also want the group to create the tavern almost as a character, since I want them to feel for it. It should have some kind of "personality" and the players/characters should feel proud and want it to prosper. I only have a couple of ideas as of yet what building it will look like, but each character will have one area of responsibility ("The Kitchen", "The Stable", "The Money" or something) and have a bunch of dice connected to the responsibility. These can be added to help out in conflicts, either to your own character's or to the others'.

What happens in play is that the GM introduces a customer with a request. The request can be simple ("Please put my horse in the stable"), complicated ("As a troll, I only eat human hearts for dinner") or downright weird ("As a lesser god, I need some believers. Could you please hold a service in my honor this evening?"). The thing is that the tavern has a "the customer's always right"-policy, and will do their best to satisfy any request.

When one of the players has his character start working on the request, anyone (players and GM) can introduce complications, which will make the request harder to finish, but will increase the reward. The player working on the request will have his character enter conflicts to try to collect enough successes, as determined by the number of complications. If he manages to do that, he will add that number of dice to a tavern resource pool that will be divided between the responsibilities at the end of the session. More complications equal a higher reward for all.

I could go on, but I think this is enough for now. I don't have a clear picture of how character effectiveness will be reduced, but I want some kind of "damage system" (lowered attributes and traits) related to failed conflicts. More on that in later threads, perhaps.

Now we reach the question on player engagement. I don't want to force the players to have their characters all present in every scene; I actually want them to get hit by enough customer requests to keep them all busy on separate story threads. But I still want them all to listen what's going on in the scenes that happen to the other players.

The things I've done to promote this is:

1. They all profit or lose depending on how the others handle requests. If the others manage to finish a request they all benefit, as they get to divide the tavern resource pool in the end.

2. They're all needed for introducing complications. If one player introduces a complication he can't introduce another until everyone else has. This forces everyone to listen to what's going on, as they might have to add a complication to keep the game going. Adding a complication can be as easy as saying "The city guard notices the bloody parcel with the heart", and then the GM and the player involved will have to play on that. This will encourage throwing in ideas as the others are playing, something I like.

3. I want to add instructions how to cut between scenes, in order to keep suspense. First there's a round of adding complications, until the player decides to do something about the situation. That'll be a nice place to cut to another player, and then return to the first one a bit later. Now the player will describe what traits he's using and what relationships and so on. If he fails the roll an automatic complication will be added, and here's another nice place to cut to someone else.

4. The players can grant each other resource dice from their own responsibility pool, even if their character is not present. This can help people out, and I want to encourage these negotiations ("I'm out of dice and you have ten dice in the Kitchen. Give me five of them, we all need this!")

5. The players should be able to help out, by having their character join the scene of the other character and rolling dice to add to the conflict. If something goes wrong, both of them should be "damaged" (whatever that is).

But what I'm thinking about now are these questions:

Q1: Should players be able to play NPCs when their PC is not present? If they can, they really get involved in the scene and people usually like to be part of what's going on. On the other hand, what happens if they want to introduce their own character to help out? Should they ditch the NPC, play both or what? Do you feel more attached to the PC if you only play him and no one else?

Q2: Is getting the reward in the end of the session (dividing gained resource dice) enough to keep people interested in what's going on, or should I have some more *immediate* reward or penalty for the other players/characters? If your own character have a harder time in the *next* conflict depending on what happens to your friend *now*, perhaps you're more engaged?

Q3: There's a risk that each player will only bother about his own customer request and only use the responsibility dice on this. Should I limit the spending of these to the requests of the other players? The downside then is that I want people to be selfish to a certain extent. I want them to spend communal dice on themselves only to have the other players booing, but at the same time I want them to help each other overcome the difficulties.

Q4: How do I promote cooperation and selfishness at the same time? That's the hardest one to answer, perhaps. Am I on the right track, or should I do something differently?

I'd be glad to answer your questions, if I should expand some part of my description. I've glossed over a lot of things that I have notes on, so perhaps it's hard to form a picture of what I have in mind. Ask me in that case, and thanks in advance for any comments.

Although it's not a response to one of your questions, I'm still tempted to ask: what is the reason behind the "customer is always right" policy of the Tavern? To me it seems that enforcing such a policy on the players would result in limiting their role-playing. If players want to be brash and rude to some of their customers (for instance, the chief character may be very intolerant when it comes to dealing with customers coming from a certain land, country or city and thus refuse special orders from such guests), then let them be - but make them feel the consequences of their actions (the chief might refuse to spice up, or maliciously add excessive amount of spice, the meal of, say, a diplomat from a country he dislikes who happened to visit the tavern - and the offended diplomat decides to take action against the PCs, i.e. influencing local authorities to find something crooked in the fiscal operations of the tavern). Let every request falling on deaf ears result in severe complications, maybe even long-term ones.

Q1: Should players be able to play NPCs when their PC is not present? If they can, they really get involved in the scene and people usually like to be part of what's going on. On the other hand, what happens if they want to introduce their own character to help out? Should they ditch the NPC, play both or what? Do you feel more attached to the PC if you only play him and no one else?

Q4: How do I promote cooperation and selfishness at the same time? That's the hardest one to answer, perhaps. Am I on the right track, or should I do something differently?

Sweet!! I love odd ball stuff like this, which incidently is akin to my own Mischief & Mayhem title.

- Flaws could also be a trait introduced to the characters, such as disliking the diplomat or desting trolls in general to being overly enthusiastic about Garlic, and then there is a vampire entorage from a local vampire convention staying at the Tavern. It would hamper, or at least be a free complication, any request or goal.

- Is a GM really needed? My Mischief & Mayhem plays through just fine without one. One possibility may be that each player creates a customer as well, who imposes their desires upon the Inn, essentially running dual characters: 1 consistant, the Tavern shareholder, and one fluctuating, the customer.
I'm thinking there could be some kind of dual balance here: if the customer's requests aren't met, the Tavern feels some kind of result while the player gets some kind of reward, but if they are met the Tavern AND the players get some kind of reward.

- I like the idea of players being able to manage NPC's. I'd reward their actions for complicating the matter, and allow NPCs to be a vehicle for compliation introduction. One possible setup may be the Tavern owner and the Customer players cannot play an NPC in a scene where that request relationship is played, but the other players can introduce NPCs to their hearts content, even following your idea of complication cycles: I may introduce and play one NPC, but cannot do so until Bob and Joe each have also introduced someone. Thus, we get fewer mobs of NPCs usually, and GM-less play.

- Cooperation while competing can be difficult. M&M achieves something similar in its Trait functions: each of the characters are comprised of three traits, two chosen by the player him/herself, one chosen by the rest of the group (Thus, we end up with some badass Necromancer Imp with a facination for ballerinas or a pacificst imp with a love of cows). Using a metagame resource, players can then bid against each other to force them to use a given trait. One common one is a form of the Distraction trait: one AP report had one of the players dangerously close to completing an objective, but another player wanted to steal the limelight and outbid that player on using the trait: just as the player was to reach for the item they had to retrieve, their attention was caught by an insect, and they were obsessed with insects and off they went.

PrzeSzkoda (sorry to ask, but is this your real name?), thanks for challenging one of my assumptions, one I find doesn't really hold. I assumed I needed a way to explain why the characters go to such lengths trying to handle the requests. But I don't! If there's a mechanical punishment to not fulfill a request the player will try to do it, even though the character might be reluctant. It's actually more fun if the character doesn't like it, but press on. It doesn't have to be "the customer's always right" it can be "the customer's obviously wrong, but if I don't do this we won't get any more customers".

I like the idea of having conflicting goals, the private versus the goals of the tavern. I'll have to think about that for a while, since I don't want the characters or the situation to get too complex. Perhaps the combined number of dice on the areas of responsibility determines the total reputation of the tavern, but that it's the most famous for whatever responsibility holds the most dice at the moment. Then you'll have to fight both to increase the overall number of dice available, since that'll perhaps attract better customers, and to increase your own area of responsibility. If you're the chef, you want the tavern to be the most frequented in the area, famous for it's cooking, but if you're taking care of the stable you want that to be famous.

Nate, and PrzeSzkoda, the flaws are a great idea, especially if they're coupled with Nate's idea of having people choose one trait for each other. I'm sure the traits could be used both in a positive and a negative way, depending on how you invoke them, and that could be fun. If someone chooses "Great chef" someone else could invoke it when he's trying to cook something really simple, invoking the complication "You just *can't* serve potato soup to the noblewoman, but instead prepare some lobster. Too bad she's a vegetarian." What I don't know right now is what these invocations will do. If it's a free out-of-turn-order extra complication, the only thing that'll happen is that the group reaches dice rolling faster. I'm toying with the idea to have the players being able to lower their own request goal numbers by increasing the others'. This would not change the reward for the tavern, the total goal number would still be the same, but it would shift some problems from yourself to someone else. That's exactly what I want to happen.

I like the idea of having people choosing traits for each other during character creation; that should really help getting them interested in the other characters. I mean, it's quite common to be interested in what the others are doing, but now you can give them a trait and just wait to activate it for them. That should be fun. Especially if it's chosen by the whole group, then you get to discuss the other character in greater detail.

I want to have a GM in this game, and I'll write the game so that he's needed. I've written and played in GM-less games, so I'm not unfamiliar with it, but I just want to keep the GM in this case. One reason is because I think it's easier to coordinate the different story arcs, and cut between them, if you have one person who's on the outside of all the action. If the GM ends one scene in a cliffhanger, he can immediately turn to the player who should be next. Without a GM you either need a set pattern as to who gets a scene, or you need vocal players who will grab center stage as soon as it's available.

Another reason I want the GM is to have someone responsible for describing the locations and the people they see. It can be done by the individual players, but then you need to give them a reason to describe stuff, for example that they're the one framing the next scene or that it's a location connected to their character or something. I think that the players will tell the GM where they want to go next, I plan to have a map with suggestive location names like the map tiles of Stranger Things, but that the GM will describe the place.

Still another reason is that I want the customers to be separate from the players, because I want them to seem utterly incomprehensible sometimes. I want the customers to request things that galvanize the group, and make them all determined to satisfy the customer. I think it's harder for a player to mess with the other players if they know they can get hurt themselves if they don't fulfill the request. The GM, on the other hand, can be completely ruthless. Well, actually, it doesn't matter really how the request is formulated. If the customer wants a human heart for dinner and the player says "Oh, we just had a new batch delivered", there are no complications and the request is resolved immediately. On the other hand, a request to get the horse put in the stable can spiral out of control and get tons of complications added to it.

Finally, on playing NPCs. I know that it's a lot of fun to do this, both as GM to see the others go wild and as a player to play something else for a moment. The GM will always play the most important NPC in each scene, or at least the "main attraction" of the scene, so he has something to do. I don't think I'll reward players per se, but I think it'll still be an attractive option for some players to play NPCs. This would give two options when introducing complications. Either you don't play an NPC, and just throw in suggestions to the people playing, or you play an NPC and add complications in-character. The difference would be between "The city guard notices the bloody parcel. Complication!" to "Hey, what's in that bloody parcel there? Complication!", and the player would be able to choose what kind of input he's the most comfortable with.

Thanks a lot, so far, you two. It's a great help, both to get input that makes me consider things I haven't thought of, and to try to explain my thinking as things are always clearer when you see them written down. This is very helpful.

Hello!

You must run, not walk, to acquire a copy of Inspectres. It is one of the great role-playing games and is totally about the success of the small/startup company, based on the stress and investment of its members. Many of the suggestions you've received so far are related to specific mechanics in it.

For purposes of clarifying how you'd like your own game to work, whether by refinement or by contrast, InSpectres is a must-read, must-play.

Best,
Ron

Hello Ron,

Yes, I have both read and game mastered InSpectres a couple of times. Those sessions were among the most fun I've ever had with a role-playing game, since so much of what's going on is distributed among all participants. It's one of the games I feel confident enough to use if I'm going to introduce "alternative role-playing", or just role-playing, to someone. InSpectres is going to be a major influence, as you say, either as a measure of what I want and what I don't want.

I should probably have listed that as an inspiration in the introduction post, but there are so many games I'm going to borrow stuff from.

What I especially want to borrow from InSpectres:

* The naive notion that if everyone shares everything, it will all work out.
* Having to take a bullet for the company. Choosing between company improvement or character healing between sessions.
* The sharp left-and-right turns the story takes, but that you still know when it ends.
* I do like the possibility to change the characters of the others at run-time, adding characteristics, and that all benefit if they accept the changes.
* That the company has shared resources, but that someone's responsible for distributing them.

What I don't want to borrow, because I don't like it or it doesn't fit the theme:

* Arbitrary stress rolls called for by the GM.
* Narration rights depending on the roll. Well, perhaps, we'll see when I hammer out the resolution system.
* That the Talents rarely get used, based on my own experience, either because the player forgets about them or because they don't give enough of a benefit in conflicts.

It's going to be interesting to go back to this list further on, to see if I stuck to it or not.

Oh!

Well, in that case, you're all set. My feedback is mainly, "Try it one way, then try it another, and see which ways you like best." I'm not sure my specific replies will add more than that, but I hope so.

Q1: Should players be able to play NPCs when their PC is not present? If they can, they really get involved in the scene and people usually like to be part of what's going on. On the other hand, what happens if they want to introduce their own character to help out? Should they ditch the NPC, play both or what? Do you feel more attached to the PC if you only play him and no one else?

Q2: Is getting the reward in the end of the session (dividing gained resource dice) enough to keep people interested in what's going on, or should I have some more *immediate* reward or penalty for the other players/characters? If your own character have a harder time in the *next* conflict depending on what happens to your friend *now*, perhaps you're more engaged?

Q3: There's a risk that each player will only bother about his own customer request and only use the responsibility dice on this. Should I limit the spending of these to the requests of the other players? The downside then is that I want people to be selfish to a certain extent. I want them to spend communal dice on themselves only to have the other players booing, but at the same time I want them to help each other overcome the difficulties.

Q4: How do I promote cooperation and selfishness at the same time? That's the hardest one to answer, perhaps. Am I on the right track, or should I do something differently?

Jonas wrote:

Q1: Should players be able to play NPCs when their PC is not present? If they can, they really get involved in the scene and people usually like to be part of what's going on. On the other hand, what happens if they want to introduce their own character to help out? Should they ditch the NPC, play both or what? Do you feel more attached to the PC if you only play him and no one else?

Some more thoughts:

"1. They all profit or lose depending on how the others handle requests. If the others manage to finish a request they all benefit, as they get to divide the tavern resource pool in the end."

My group, at least, would be very excited by self-interest, and player-versus-player conflict.  They would want to be able to benefit (whatever that means) in some way that might damage other player characters.  "Everyone works together, everyone wins" is fun, but if there is the mechanical temptation to screw your neighbor, so much the better.

It seems like the game will be all about the dice.  Maybe they can be used as scene markers - you can gain one die per scene, and so gaining five dice will require significant energy and creativity in framing multiple scenes.  Maybe these cannot be declared consecutively, forcing players to interleave scenes if they want to gain multiple dice.  Maybe the size of the die has some mechanical effect on scene framing.  Maybe resource dice are accrued (or expended)  in some set pattern or quantity - D4, then D6, then D10, then back to D4, for example, or 1 die, then 2, then 3, then 1 again.  The scenes ebb and flow based on the value of the die/dice available.  Just thinking out loud,

--Jason

Wow, this sounds like lots of fun! One part InSpectres, one part Floating Vagabond...

A thought struck me about how to get players involved and engaged in other scenes. This might not be enough on its own, but feels like it might provide a cool dynamic.

A player can drop in complications at any time to any open request except their own. When he does so, he immediately gets an extra die in some discretionary dice pool (sort of like PTA fan mail). This should directly encourage players to contribute complications to other scenes. But! Each complication for a request, in addition to providing fodder for fun new scenes, increases the overall mechanical difficulty of the request as a whole. Players want to pile on lots of complications to get some dice for themselves, but if they pile on too many, and the request fails, they all suffer somehow from the failed business for the inn, etc.

Setting up the dice economy for something like this would probably require some tweaking to get the dynamic you really want. Does adding a complication benefit player A more than it costs player B? If so, I could see a situation where they're both dumping complications on each other until they both come out ahead. That might be cool, but there are plenty of other ways it could work.

-Albert

Jonas wrote:
PrzeSzkoda (sorry to ask, but is this your real name?), thanks for challenging one of my assumptions, one I find doesn't really hold. I assumed I needed a way to explain why the characters go to such lengths trying to handle the requests. But I don't! If there's a mechanical punishment to not fulfill a request the player will try to do it, even though the character might be reluctant. It's actually more fun if the character doesn't like it, but press on. It doesn't have to be "the customer's always right" it can be "the customer's obviously wrong, but if I don't do this we won't get any more customers"

Hello,

I have a question, after some reflection.

InSpectres works very well for all the dynamics you're describing. Why not just change the Color and Setting to match the stereotypical dungeon-group and use InSpectres otherwise intact? Why bother writing a new game?

Best,
Ron

Jason, thanks for the suggestion. I haven't really read it yet, but now I've at least glanced through the playtest pdf. I don't want the GM role to rotate in The Tavern, but I'm not averse to distributing GM tasks. I want the GM to be responsible for the pace and for ensuring that everyone gets to act and grab the spotlight for a while. The two GM tasks that will be most clearly available to the players are the ability to add complications to each other's story lines and to play NPCs, as mentioned in a previous post.

Also, about messing with your friends. I don't want to encourage outright competition for resources, and I want all in-game rewards to first go to the tavern and then be distributed among the characters. What I do want is to promote freeloading. I want the player to benefit from others carrying the heaviest burden when they deal with almost impossible customer requests. The other player will have to hurt his own character in some way, with all the rewards going to the tavern. Then they'll have to discuss how to divide the reward, which will probably lead to debates. It is competition in a way, but it's not pitting character against character.

Albert, you're absolutely right and precisely describe what I want to happen. Increasing the difficulty of your own or someone else's request will make it harder to complete, but the rewards also increase. The thing is that the tavern (including yourself) should benefit even if the other player will have to hurt his character to fulfill the request, but you don't want him to fail completely. So you'll push the other player further and further on, but if things spiral out of control, and I want that to be a possibility, you'll have to step in and help him out.

Przemyslaw, yes, but I think I'll have mechanical pressure as well as social. Unattended requests will have their goal number increase at certain points of the game, I think, and at the end of the session (or earlier) unfinished requests will backlash and hurt the tavern somehow.

Ron, the most important question first: Why write the game? There are parts of InSpectres that I would have to leave out or redo completely to fit my view of this game. Of course I could tweak it, leaving confessionals, narration rights and stress rolls out of it, and add mechanics to quantify and reward kibitzing, but that would almost be a new game in itself. I also like to build games, and this time I want to make a conscious effort to produce something that others might read and play.

On your previous post; the flashpoint technique really sounds cool! I hadn't read Zero at the Bone before, but I think it would make the pacing of the game a lot more structured, but at the same time more intense. The flashpoint technique seems the most interesting if the players can somehow affect each other's rolls, which is exactly what they will in The Tavern. I picture the GM and players introducing complications in each other's story arcs until one after another indicates that he wants to roll dice. You continue until everyone is involved in a dice conflict, but now you have to decide who of the players gets bonus dice from the tavern, if any. The discussions here could be really fun, with players arguing that they need the resources more than the others, all to prevent putting the welfare of their character on the line.

The thing is that most requests won't get fulfilled in one conflict, so I'll have to figure out a way to "restart" the game and to get everyone, some with new requests and some still on their old into new flashpoints. But that's resolution mechanics, and will be a possible topic in a future post.

I also like rewards during the session. Without going into the resolution-reward system too deeply I think that fulfilling a request with a goal value of 7 would immediately give 7 bonus dice to the tavern that could be used by the other players in their conflicts. Something like that. I'd also like to have a stage at the end of the session where you buy improvements to the tavern and heal the characters, and that this stage would also feel like a reward to the players (provided that they want to improve their tavern, that is). I want a constant trickle of rewards during the session with a bigger moment of celebration or despair at the end of the session, depending on the future prospects of the tavern. These are all "in-game" rewards, and I haven't really considered the social rewards of putting pressure on your friends and watching them handle it in unexpected ways. This I'll have to do later on, to make sure that those parts are well supported by the game and are recurring events in every session.

I feel like my questions in the first post has either been answered here or in my head, as I've been thinking about the answers you guys have provided. I suspect my next thread will concern either the resolution system or character creation.

Thanks again, everyone! If you have further comments they're of course welcome, but you should know I'm moving on now.