So, having thought hard on all the good stuff said in the most recent Misery Bubblegum thread, I sat myself down and put together an actual draft ruleset.

Man, this is a wierd feeling... putting a new ruleset out there, and knowing that it's broken, as it stands. Don't let anyone tell you the first one is the hardest. For the first rules you don't have any standards.

Anyway, there are things I love about the system as it stands:

• A quick set of rolls determine who succeeds (task resolution) and who decides what it means (conflict resolution). They're often not the same person. This can leave you with important choices to make halfway through about which of the two (task or conflict) you value more.
• It has a mechanic that would actually lead people to have this exchange, as a rules discussion: "If you hurt her, I will come for you." "Is that a threat?" "It's a promise."
• The most powerful mechanic for helping your own character is also the most powerful mechanic for hurting your own character: and you're putting the choice of how it gets used entirely and irredeemably in the hands of another player.

And then there are the problems, which I would love some help with:

• The reward mechanic gives you more dice to add to your pools, but there is no effective mechanism in place to reduce the overall number of dice in the game.
• I'd like that mechanic (whatever it might be) to be voluntary: that the players spend those dice on something important to them. But I'm not seeing what would be more valuable to them than having the dice, if only to stave off the crippling effects of Misery.
• It may be too complicated for the human mind to actually grasp and use, but I'm no longer a good judge of that.

If anyone can help, particularly with the question of where all the dice go, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!

Hrm... here's a thought. What if, by default, the GM frames all scenes. But you can shift one of your dice from one of your piles into the Spare in order to call for a specific scene to be framed. And the pile you spend it off of determines something about what the scene means to your character. So if you spend it off of Passion then it's a scene where your characters emotions and passions are engaged, and so on.

And, of course, the great temptation is to spend it off of Misery, since those are dice that you wouldn't be able to roll on anything (until you applied the Misery to some Trait). But then what you're telling the GM is "Frame this scene for me, but make sure that it's in the way most likely to cause my character further sadness." Which is a pretty cool storytelling option to be encouraging people to through the rules.

Do you think people would go for that? I can see two ways of thinking about it: On the positive side, people feel deserving of anything that they can spend valuable resources to buy, so maybe they'll feel more free to frame scenes if they have to pay for it. On the negative side, folks do hoard resources, and the idea that the GM frames all the scenes is a natural one that they might not work hard to buck.

But then what you're telling the GM is "Frame this scene for me, but make sure that it's in the way most likely to cause my character further sadness." Which is a pretty cool storytelling option to be encouraging people to through the rules.

By "product" do you mean like the first draft rules, or like a bound, playtested, final copy being sold for a reasonable sum?

Um.... First draft rules I guess. *L*

-Eric

Okely-dokely, I want to start off here nice and easy. (Tony, feel free to split this off to another thread - I have a feeling it diverges from the topics you want to discuss) ...

Let's say I want to make up a character for Misery Bubblegum (and I do!).

Tony, in the rules for Misery Bubblegum, wrote: All characters have, at all times, three pools of dice: Passion, Confidence and Insight. Each of the pool-types has a number permanently associated with it (usually between 1 and 6).

Hey, I really appreciate the interest, but I'm going to hold off on responding: Last night I did a first play-test with Shawn de Arment (yay DC Area Forgite gathering! Both of us!), and my conclusion is that the rules as written are horrifically broken. The gap you've noticed is just one of many.

On the good side, using the rules showed me a lot of how the parts can interact, which parts are not yet doing anything (quite a few of them) and which parts are doing really powerful stuff without adequate controls. A very successful playtest.

I am hoping to get a new and much improved version out by this evening. So I hope you'll be patient until then, and I will be sure to address your concerns therein.

Hurrah for horrific brokenness! Damned sorry I couldn't make the DC gathering -- was working/not sleeping all weekend. I actually had a chance to read over the rules, though, and was wondering: What is the mechanical incentive to put any effort into succeeding at a specific task, as opposed to defining-meaning (i.e. conflict)?

In the old, broken, version that incentive was buried in Desires and Promises (i.e. a penalty if you didn't succeed by enough when those were active). Broken.

In the new and improved version, the Misery cost of a conflict as a whole is calculated, and then the person who succeeds gets to determine who (of the combatants) gets smacked with that Misery. I hope that will make the tasks themselves more hotly contested, particularly on big, Misery-laden rolls.

Sorry I couldn't make it either. I do eventually want to see MB in play, but I procrastinated myself into a weekend with a whole lot of work to get done.

Okay, no more old, broken version. New (presumably also broken) version!

Gone:

• Activating resources
• Deactivating resources
• Unmotivated traits
• The vaguely worded "Promises"
• Cripplingly high levels of sudden, unavoidable Misery

Added:

• Constant little dribs and drabs of misery, like CHINESE WATER TORTURE! AGGGH!
• Ways for other players to take advantage of your Misery, but also to relieve it
• Victory means making others Miserable rather than yourself... or maybe the other way around, if you're selfless... sucker!
• Using other people's Traits against them
• The much improved "Roles" replaces "Promises"

And, hopefully, it's about a hundred times more readable. Sometime tonight I am hoping to get a substantial Example of Play on-line. If nothing else, the solo playtesting should help me to know more clearly whether I've got any gaping omissions in the text of the game.

Oh, and I forgot the big question: How should Desires, Threats and Roles be reduced? I've got rules for how they're increased, but it's not clear to me how they should be reduced.

It's clear, however, that there should be a way of doing so. If you fall in love with someone, and they spurn you, then you are faced with a choice to keep pining (even if you also move on to other things) or to stop wanting their love. That's not a choice if you don't have a mechanical way to reduce the "Desire: X's Love" value.

Would it make sense to convert the thwarted Desire into Misery? You stop wanting their love, but are left miserable. The Misery can then be dealt with, and you're back where you started. This probably doesn't work as well for other examples, though.

Sorry, my head is spinning. The rules are so different from any game I've ever seen. I never imagined Nar could have so much delicious crunchy strategy! Looks very playable and fun.

Okay, (speaking of my limited, traditional, sim background) here's another idea. Traits are reduced by Experience. Call it Certainty, Confidence, Self, whatever. Award it for whatever reasons you want (as an arbitrary roleplaying bonus, or to the player with the most Influence over the other characters, etc.). GM awards Experience, which can only be spent to reduce the value of Traits, eventually getting over them. The Experienced (Confident) character is sure of themselves, and not ruled by their Desires, Threats and Roles.

Of course this means you control your own character's Trait reduction, which seems antithetical to your theme. Should Traits only be reduced by the other players actions? Maybe instead of Confidence, characters gain Trust (or Love), which they can spend to reduce each other's Traits, by seeing past the Traits and allowing the other characters to be themselves.

Oh.... goodness. You're right. I hadn't even considered the question of who gets authority to reduce a character's Traits.

I like the player to have some control... I like, for instance, that a player has the option to raise their own traits once those traits have been established. That's a stock-market sort of way to reward people who really hit the jackpot on recommending a trait that the player loves... it gets increased to a high level, gets used more often, and they get more Influence.

But yes, I see the appeal of needing another character in order to reduce a trait. Apart from anything else, it perfectly explains rebound relationships! You need someone who is interested in helping you get over the relationship, and they (presumably) are doing it because they hope for something from you in turn, which you may or may not choose to provide for them.

And I finally have the fictional (but fun!) Example of Play online. I modified one of the rules (specifically, Threats increase Misery by being around, rather than reducing it) because the play balance was whacked as written. But other than that, and some fiddling around the vague edges, it's pretty much the rules as written.

Hey Tony,

Really enjoyed reading the example of play. Is there any chance you could expand on what 'Meaning' is - how it's derived, what it represents, how it's used?

Well, I probably ought to have... frankly... any word other than "meaning" to describe it. Basically, it's how you change around the traits.

I think that implies or requires some sense of the overall long-term consequences of your actions: if you act recklessly, and somebody adds "Threat: Recklessness" then that's a statement about what's important in the character's personality, and why, yes? Particularly by comparison with (say) "Role: Hot-head."

ya, fun Example of Play. For the rebound, could Trait reduction be part of the Bribery mechanic? Instead of only Bribing the other player with dice, you choose to Bribe them by reducing one of their Traits.

Mark has the Desire "Jessie's love", but it's been established that she will never love him. Clarice can offer him the Desire "casual rebound fling" (or better yet "revenge on Jessie"), with the Bribe of reducing his "Jessie's love".

I guess there has to be some incentive to reduce the other character's Traits, since you're not gaining Influence over them.

Tony,

I can't help with your questions yet because I'm still working my way through a clear understanding of the rules. (Hope this is still on-topic for this thread).

Everything's fine up until 'What does it mean?' Then the sudden talk about generating a Meaning total coupled with the introduction of offering, modifying or addressing Traits threw me for a loop.

My understanding of the 'What does it mean?' section

You can 'succeed' at a task by rolling over the difficulty level you've set. However, the meaning (consequences? outcome?) of that 'success' is determined by whoever has the highest total under that difficulty level, right?

Example
So Player A sets a DL of 3 and Player B sets a DL of 5.
Player A is more likely to succeed than Player B (rolling over 3 is easier than rolling over 5).
But Player B is more likely to determine the consequences of the action than Player A (rolling under 5 is easier than rolling under 3).

(OK, be warned: syntax was not my friend in the following paragraph ...)

You can offer a Trait (that means 'adding a new Trait to someone's character sheet, right?') if your Meaning Total is greater than the Target's attribute that's the same as the attribute you used.

In the example of play, Tony wrote: GM: You used Insight, and Clarice's Insight is only a 1, so you need a one Meaning to create things on her. ...

In the example of play, Tony wrote: GM: ... Your primary Meaning is three, your secondary is one, so you can go crazy, even with that low total.

... in Misery Bubblegum, Tony wrote: The direction of the arrow you follow will also determine how your dice pools change. Whichever Trait your primary meaning effects, all the dice you can claim back from the roll (after whatever Misery you suffer) will go into the attribute pool that arrow continues on toward. So if you roll your Insight Pool, and choose to offer a Desire for someone else, then your reclaimed dice will end up in your Passion pool. If you had chosen to create a Threat then they would have ended up in your Nerve pool instead.

Steve, the things you understand, you understand well.

As for reclaiming dice: Say you've got five dice on Nerve, and roll four of them. Now they're in the "Rolled" area. There's actually a "Roll" area right there on the character sheet, for convenience. Then eventually, when you're done with the roll, they go somewhere else. But where?

First, if the Victor dumps a point of Misery on you then one of those dice goes to Misery. It's very hard to get any use out of it while it's there. So that's bad. If they dump four points of Misery on you then all four of those dice go to Misery.

After that, if you didn't get... Emotional Content? Opinions? Whatever I end up calling the thing currently mislabelled "Meaning", then the remaining dice go back where they came from (in this case Nerve).

If, however, you got... oh, hell, I'm going with Opinions. If you get control of Opinions then the dice migrate along the line defined by your Primary choice. So if you chose to create a Role off of your roll then the remaining dice go to Passion. If you chose to create a Threat then they go to Insight. Wherever they go, they don't end up in Nerve.

So, now... What are Opinions/Meaning/Whatever? And are they really "The meaning of the action"? Bear with me, because this stuff is really fuzzy in my head. If you have a better way of thinking about it or expressing it, I'm all ears.

But, basically, your character will be defined in large part by what people think of you. You can reject provisional Traits, but it costs you (you get more Misery, rather than getting dice that could be helping you). So when you're feeling desperate and miserable you are going to act according to the opinions people have formed of you.

And, critically, those opinions can be very, very unfair. Let's talk about a school play. Say Ricky becomes the Director of the school play. He absolutely knocks himself out making sure that everything goes right. Lots of rehearsals, schedules, to-do lists, all that. There are two obvious possibilities as a result: His actors think he's a cool guy, a together director, and they appreciate him. Or they think he's an utter twit, a demanding slave-driver, they hate his guts and figure they could do a better play without him.

The more dedicated he is to the success of the play, as a play, the less opportunity Ricky will have to influence those opinions in any way shape or form. A classic line in this situation is "I don't care what people think, all I care about is that the play is the best it can be."

That's a horrible, ridiculous lie. Of course he cares what people think. But he puts his effort into the play, even though it gives him less control over people's opinions, for a few very valid reasons:

• If he doesn't try to sway their decisions then he can't be said to have failed. If they hate him, it's not like he was trying for any other goal.
• If they end up hating him, at least he'll have the accomplishment of a really cool play to console him.
• The play is (in large part) something he can personally control. The opinions of others are forever an area where he is at the mercy of... well... others.
• He thinks that success in the play will equal success with his peers (probably because he's very, very clueless or optimistic or both)

So I think that is what I'm overall getting at with Victory vs. Opinion/Meaning. That achieving something makes you less likely to be the one who expresses an opinion about the people who were involved.

I'm not really sure, now that I write it this way, that Victory isn't Conflict Resolution. I could see someone saying (for instance) "I want to make sure that Theresas spotlight soliloquy has every eye in the house glued to her," and I think that would be handled by Victory.

But it's not CR with unlimited Stakes. If he's saying "I want Theresa to love me for having given her such a great part"... well, there is no room in this rule system to force that sort of outcome. If you define the Victory, Victory can't deal with the opinions and emotions of others. If you define the Meaning/Opinion, the best you can do is express how much Ricky wants Theresa's love, or to express Ricky's opinion and hope that she wants his love in return.

Yeah... that's the trick there in a nut-shell. There's no ability to represent "Theresa Loves Ricky." Whether Theresa actually loves Ricky or not is a matter upon which the rules system is forever silent. You can do one of three things:

• Desire: Theresa feels better when Ricky is happy, or when Ricky is near her, or when she's seen with a hot guy (of which Ricky is one), or whatever.
• Role: People treat Theresa as Ricky's girlfriend, and that gives her power at the same time it constrains her.
• Threat: The fact of Ricky makes it hard for her to pursue her goals, even if those goals actually involve getting close to Ricky.

Each of those has clear-cut effects, but none of them is "Theresa Loves Ricky."

Hi.

The concept sounds quite interesting.

A few questions/comments:

- How does the GM use dies? Has he got a limited pool, too?

- What's the difference between a Trait and a Role? "Little miss smarty-pants know-it-all" sounds very much like a role.
Could you do without Traits? The rules are very complex already.

- How do Role dice and Threat dice interact? Do they cancel each other one for one?

- Is the distinction between red and blue arrows gone in the second draft? There is nothing about creating stuff for yourself vs. doing stuff on others.

- You somtimes use the word "Trait" for Desires, Roles and Threats. That's a bit confusing.

On the issue of players buying down their Traits, maybe if you get the highest Opinion Total, you can elect to take the primary score as Misery on yourself ... and that makes you eligible to buy down a Trait with your secondary score?

I also like your earlier suggestion of spending a Misery dice to create a scene centring around the character's miserable situation. But I'm not sure what 'a scene centring around the character's miserable situation' would be like, mechanically.

***

1of3, as I understand it - Desires, Threats and Roles are all types of Traits.

I downloaded the new rules and I have a few questions:

Question 1
In What if my character has a big sword you say, "You ... never get to define Traits for your character"

But in What does it mean? you describe the 3 flavors of traits.
1. You can establish Desires for your character or others...
2. You can establish Threats against your character or others...
3. You can establish Roles your character plays in the lives of others...

Does establish have a special meaning? And why can you establish Desires and Treats in others, but not Roles?

Question 2
If you don't take a trait that is offered to you, what happens to it and the dice bribe? Can the offering player retrieve those dice?

Question 3
I notice that on the character sheet, you have Traits in addition to Desires, Roles, and Threats. Is this an overflow if you have more than 3 Desires (for instance), or does it serve some other purpose?

Something in the file seems broken. If you read the first draft, Traits are different from Threats, Desires and Promises.

1 of 3: The second draft is different from the first draft. Traits are no longer a separate thing, as of the second draft.

Shawn: Question #1: The "What does it mean?" section is incorrect. You can only establish Desires, Threats and Roles for other characters. My bad.

Question #2: I had it in my head that the player could, at any point, repudiate the Trait and take the Influence die back as Misery. I don't think it made it into the second draft. Good catch!

Question #3: Uh... I didn't edit the character sheet enough. The Trait section needs a complete makeover.

TonyLB wrote: After that, if you didn't get... Emotional Content? Opinions?

or Reaction? Result and Reaction.

Opinions confuses me. I liked Meaning though.

Doug: I really don't think that "Significance" is a better idea than "Meaning". What they both convey is that the victory itself is insignificant or meaningless, which isn't what I'm trying to get across. But, honestly, I don't think Victory is really what I'm looking for on the other side, either.

Basically, you have two modes of significance: there's rising to an external challenge, and then there's the social landscape.

Can these even be handled in the same roll? Or do they need to be separate things? I'm inclined to think that they need to be intertwined, because forming opinions about others and validating or refuting their opinions of you is something that you do while you're focussed on other goals. "Life is what happens while you are making other plans", and all that.

But it gets very funky when your plans are "Make Jenny think I'm cool," rather than "Score a touchdown to win the homecoming game." Because then you're aiming at the social fabric, so what happens that you're not focussed on? Do your attempts to influence Jenny cause unexpected opinions from other people (e.g. Marty gives you the well-deserved "Role: Show-off")? Or, if you're aiming at the social fabric, does your victory imply that only the social change that you're looking for occurs? That seems... limiting.

TonyLB wrote: Doug: I really don't think that "Significance" is a better idea than "Meaning". What they both convey is that the victory itself is insignificant or meaningless, which isn't what I'm trying to get across. But, honestly, I don't think Victory is really what I'm looking for on the other side, either.

Yes, that's pretty much what I'm saying. But the model breaks down when your short-term goal is to affect transformative change.

Which, I suspect, means that the current mixed model is seductive but flawed. But maybe I'm just missing an important piece.

TonyLB wrote: Yes, that's pretty much what I'm saying. But the model breaks down when your short-term goal is to affect transformative change.

Which, I suspect, means that the current mixed model is seductive but flawed. But maybe I'm just missing an important piece.

There's no inherent flaw in the concept that it's hard to change people's emotional landscape. The flaw is that, in order to do that, players have to make up some nonsense Task that they're nominally attempting, but which they care absolutely nothing about, because they don't intend to succeed at it.

"Okay, I want to bribe Cassandra with 'Threat: Parental strictness.' So... uh... I'll attempt to jump over the moon, at difficulty six, rolling three dice. 1, 5 and 3. Oh darn, I failed to jump over the moon... lots of points to create the Threat-trait I wanted, though."

I'm tempted to say, instead, that rolling your own dice is for conflicts ("Do I get into the castle?", "Do I find the incriminating evidence?", "Do I look good at the dance?") but can never impact someone's emotions ("Do I get into the clique?", "Do I find the key to her heart?", "Do I impress her?") When you're doing these sorts of things, you can give away dice as Influence to substantially better your chances (in the ways described already).

Then when you're rolling Influence dice against each other, you are (inherently) attempting to form an opinion of someone. Winner gets to form an opinion, but has to give the Influence dice to the loser. Loser gets their dice back (for conflict purposes), but doesn't get to form an opinion.

But that's two resolution systems, which doesn't really thrill me either.

OK, good point. But I don't think the problem is with the die-rolling mechanic; the problem is that you're allowing the 'nonsense' task to come into play in the first place.

This is awfully similar to some of those Capes discussions you, Fred and Ralph had a while back (well, mainly you guys, if I recall.) In Capes one of the issues raised was that there appeared to be little control over a player's narration of how they went about a task... this time, the issue is over controlling what tasks a player is allowed to choose to attempt in the first place.

I'm also going to suggest that even if you change the die-rolling part, this problem won't go away - so deal with it as it is now. Think about how the players are going to agree which tasks and/or conflicts are significant enough to require the dice to start moving.

Here's two options for starters: require agreement from other players before a player can start to roll dice for something, or require a payment of some resource before the dice can be rolled. Maybe both...

Yeah. If you allow players to call for die-rolls then you've got to make sure that there's nothing broken about them calling for die rolls for everything, down to and including taking a breath, if that makes strategic sense according to the dice.

That is, in fact, some of why I was considering breaking it out into two sections, to make a system that will (itself) pace you nicely on what things should be challenges, and what shouldn't. For a very rough draft of my thinking:

• The GM has a set of dice to represent the "adventure" types of challenge, and how prevalent they currently are: the Big Bad in Buffy terminology. A-Plot by Sydney's definitions.
• Players can give their dice away to other players as Influence in the course of dealing with the GM's adventure dice. When the GM is (for the moment) out of adventure dice then there's no point in beating up on bad-guys any more. You can do it, but it profits you nothing. Generally you'll just cut away to a non-action scene.
• Players gain traits by having other people spend their Influence dice. However, as those dice are spent, the GM gains adventure-dice. When you're all out of Influence dice then there's no point in engaging in character-definition scenes and emotional tension. You can do it, but it profits you nothing. Generally you'll cut away to an action scene.

Now things aren't actually that simple, because it's never going to be as clean as "All the Influence dice are gone, now it's time to go achieve something" or "All the Adventure-dice are gone, now it's time to go brood and work on our relationships." All of those things will be operating, to greater or lesser extents, all the time. But the "greater or lesser extents" is quantifiable: When the GM has more adventure dice you're encouraged to go out and try to achieve things. When the PCs have more influence dice you're encouraged to help define and refine each other's identities. In both cases, calling for a roll is spending a renewable resource, and if you do it in the same mode often enough you run out of that resource until the other mode plays out.

If I can get it distilled into one mechanic, where the optimum choices under the mechanic change as a result of the different proportions of resources in the mix, however, that would be the best of both worlds.

(I tried to post this at lunch today, but my employer's network ate it.)

Tony,

If you've got a GM involved, does this really require dice-based support? This might be awfully old fashioned, but I think the GM can take care of deciding whether or not a given task or conflict is worthy of a dice roll.

I'm thinking of DiTV as I type this (for the second time) and Vincent's "say yes, or roll the dice" advice. Except in this case, it's "say yes, or say no, or roll the dice."

I think that as long as the GM can be trusted to call when a conflict adds enough to the game to deserve breaking down into a series of rolls (or at least moderating the player's requests to initiate die-rolling), then this doesn't need to be a function of the dice themselves.

In this case, the rules support would come in the form of advising the GM how to go about making that decision.

Of course, if you also want to support GM-less play, then this isn't going to be enough; I can also see the attractiveness of having an "impartial" means of deciding when play should flow from narration to conflict and back again. But it may be easier - and more fruitful - to rely on the GM's ability to judge this for themselves, with appropriate guidance.

The dice can still be used to add a tactical reward system for exposition or conflict, that's cool. But there still has to be a means for deciding authority to initiate either, and I'm not sure that leaving this to the dice is sufficient. For starters, there is nothing to ensure the quality of the exposition or conflict, just the frequency.

I may be setting up a massive strawman here, as you haven't said much about how player/GM judgement applies to this. It's just that I'm not seeing the moment of decision amongst all of the (interesting) choices available.