Overview
My friend Nick and I are plugging away on our game Shadows & Light (actually, that working title is changing, but I'll stick with it in this discussion for the sake of continuity). We've hammered out what we think is an awesome system that accomplishes our design goals, at least to some degree. Basically, we wanted to create the LARP that we always wanted to play. We know that it won't be for everyone, and we're cool with that. Here's what we wanted to accomplish:

• Fast conflict resolution (especially combat)
• Plays equally well as a table-top or LARP game
• Character death is difficult but not impossible
• Room for constant character development (increased in-game effectiveness)
• The weakest character has a chance to suceed against the most powerful
• Players create most or all of the Situation
• PC conflict and competition is the main source of fun
• The game coordinators do nothing more than logistics, record-keeping, and rules adjudication when necessary

I might be leaving some things out, since I don't have notes from our initial conversations, but those are the important ones. With that all in mind, here is the basic conflict resolution system (which is almost the entirety of rules for the game):

1) Players try to agree on the outcome of effects and actions. If they cannot come to agreement, any person can call for a conflict.
2) Stakes are agreed upon by all participants. If agreement cannot be reached, the stakes default to "damage," which can be physical, mental, social, or magical.
3) Conflict is resolved through bidding. Each player has a pool of Tokens they can use for bidding.
4) Bids are made secretly, then revealed at the same time.
5) High bid wins their stakes. If there are more than two players involved, the second-highest wins their stakes, unless the number-one bidder's stakes invalidate theirs, and so on down the line.
6) Winning bidder gives their Tokens to the loser(s).
7) Losing bidder gives their Tokens to the winner.
8) Losing bidder takes damage to the relevant Attribute the winner used (physical, mental, social, magical).

Early on, I had some reservations about immediate follow-up conflicts, but that's been eased by the introduction of the damage rules. All conflicts cause damage, which limits the ability of the losing player to take the Tokens they've gained and create a new conflict to try and win back the stakes they have just lost.

Damage
In this game, "damage" can be done to any of the character's Attributes -- Heart (social), Body (physical), Mind (mental), or Soul (magical). The damage is purely abstract, and affects the player's ability to exert control in game (by winning conflicts). So, "Body damage" might be represented by an injury to the character, but it doesn't have to be. Each point of damage in an Attribute just means that the player has to give up an extra Token when bidding from that Attribute. If you have a Mind penalty of -5, you have to give up 5 Mind Tokens just to be able to bid Mind in a conflict.

The Odd Rules
While we didn't manage to keep combat under the same exact rules as other conflicts, we did reduce the amount of special rules for combat. Essentially, when any NPC has a penalty equal to their Attribute, that Attribute is out of play until they remove the damage. If two attributes are out of play (and one of them is Body), the character is dead. This means that the bulk of NPCs (normal humans, who have no Soul Attribute), can be killed simply by taking their Body out of play. The PCs, on the other hand cannot have a penalty in Body greater than -1, unless magic is used. Thus, for the magic-using PCs, they simply cannot be killed by physical attacks, unless those attacks are enhanced by magic (or caused by magic entirely).

Conclusion
That's about it. What I'm most interested in at this point is whether anyone sees any obvious weak points in the system. I'm really happy to get negative feedback and constructive criticism. Don't anyone hold back or feel like you have to be tactful. I've got thick skin. A comment like "Your system sucks for X reason" is much more useful to me than "I like it." Of course, "Your system sucks," while it's not going to hurt my feelings, isn't particularly unless you say why you think that. I'm also open to more general comments, as well as positive feedback.

Of course, this is a simplification, but I didn't want to post the entire rules chapter. If you have any questions about how something works, let me know, and I'll clarify it right away.

Andrew wrote:
• Room for constant character development (increased in-game effectiveness)

• Players create most or all of the Situation

6) Winning bidder gives their Tokens to the loser(s).
7) Losing bidder gives their Tokens to the winner.

In this game, "damage" can be done to any of the character's Attributes -- Heart (social), Body (physical), Mind (mental), or Soul (magical). The damage is purely abstract, and affects the player's ability to exert control in game (by winning conflicts). So, "Body damage" might be represented by an injury to the character, but it doesn't have to be.

The PCs, on the other hand cannot have a penalty in Body greater than -1, unless magic is used. Thus, for the magic-using PCs, they simply cannot be killed by physical attacks, unless those attacks are enhanced by magic (or caused by magic entirely).

Andrew, I'm worried about the practicalities of keeping track of four different attributes in a LARP situation. Even though the combat resolution itself is fast, it strikes me that I'd need to:

a. Get my character sheet out of my pocket to check the current status of my attribute
b. Bid tokens and swap them over, as in the rules
c. Mark the damage on my sheet

It reminds me of my days playing White Wolf Vampire, where you were meant to keep track of how many Physical/Social/Mental traits you had. In practice, we never bothered. But in this game, it's genuinely important.

Are those attributes purely negative? Does my character (for example) start off with a Body of 4 or does he start off with a Body of 0, which just decreases?

What happens if, say, I provoke a conflict with you and, as a result, tie you up? How do you get out of the bonds, given  that it won't involve a conflict with another player?

Other than that I, er, like it. The system of swapping tokens seems very practical in LARP: each player can just keep a stash in his back pocket and the swapping over is very fast. Nice. I'm interested to see the game you're using it in.

Rev-

Character development is nothing out of the ordinary -- experience allows you to increase Attributes and Skills.

greyorm wrote: Ok. How is this accomplished mechanically? They are free at their own whim to just make things up as they see fit? Perhaps an example of play, how you see this working out, would be a good idea here.

greyorm wrote: Hrm...this would seem, to me, to make an individual less likely to want to be the bidder, since they'll always be losing ability to affect the world if they want to do something, and the only way they will gain greater ability to affect the world is to wait until someone else wants to cause a conflict with them and hope they lose.

greyorm wrote: Or, perhaps, simply declaring conflicts and then bidding 1 Token, knowing they are going to lose, in order to get a much larger return investment.

greyorm wrote: BTW, are the numbers of Tokens you can bid in any conflict limited to a certain amount? Or are the attributes just there for purposes of damage-tracking and creating bidding-minimums. How is damage resolved, BTW? One attribute point per failed bid? Or some other method?

greyorm wrote: No greater than -1? I would think it would be better to have it that they could never have penalties equal to or greater than their body (ie: Body could never go below 1).

greyorm wrote: Also, this means you can, say, drop a mountain on a rival using magic, and they can come out of it unscathed? Now, see, I'm thinking super-powered magicians blasting the world away around them to achieve their own goals...that's cool, but I'm not sure if that is the idea. Are all characters magic-users?

Hey there, Andrew! Please forgive me if I end up taking a few days between posts: I'm having a very busy September.

Firstly, I'll echo Graham's concerns about bookkeeping, although it's hardly insurmountable. Consider something like a square notecard, with a track of numbers per side per Attribute, plus colored paperclips that you can slide along the tracks. If there's space, you could squeeze other relevant character info into the middle of the card.

Do I understand correctly that you have four separate types of Tokens, one type for each Attribute? Four kinds of tokens is of greater bookkeeping concern to me. I'd either have to keep those in four separate pockets, or I'd end up doing a lot of digging and shuffling through a bag to count them out.

I'll echo Ravenscrye's question about how players will create most of the Situation, and encourage you to give that more thought. While it may have nothing to do with exchanging tokens, it is most definitely part of the System by which events are agreed upon. Who gets what kind of authority or credibility, and what limits them? In your gritty cop drama, what limits me from blowing up the moon with my eye-lasers?

As for my own questions, I've got a number of questions about all the different variables:

• How do the Attributes and the corresponding pools of Tokens interact? Is my Mind Attribute anything other than a rating of how much Mind Damage I can withstand? Can I have more Mind Tokens than my Mind Attribute? Can I bid more Mind Tokens than my Mind Attribute? How big do Attributes get?
• How many tokens do new players start with? I'm trying to get an idea for the size of these bids. Does a bid of one tokens have any chance of winning? Two? Five?
• Are there any means other than conflict to gain or lose tokens? Beware of inflation.
• How is damage healed?

In conflicts involving multiple winners and losers, to whom does each participant give their tokens? Do they choose which of several opponents gets them all? Do they split the tokens according to some formula? This could impact the handling time somewhat -- e.g., when five people greet one another, ten handshakes are exchanged.

Do coordinators ever participate in conflicts (as NPCs or on behalf of the Situation)? Where do their tokens and Attribute values come from? Are they an unchecked influx/outflux of tokens?

Does the system include alternate systems for special rules-altering abilities? You mention Magic as a special ability that can kill characters. Will there be others? Can I acquire a mystic familiar that can take Mind Damage on my behalf, or can I know a special fighting technique that treats my Body bids as one token higher? (Down this path, I fear, lies only sorrow, in the form of 345-page LARP rulebooks...)

How are PCs killed? I'm not clear on how many/which Attributes have to be out of play for that to happen.

In regard to mechanical character development, how much can my character improve over a year of bi-weekly play?

I hope these questions give you plenty to chew on! I might have time to post again tomorrow, but if not you won't hear from me until next week.

Adam, thanks for the feedback. To address your points:

• Yes, there are four different types of Tokens. Yes, that's more bookkeeping. "Tokens" can be anything from poker chips to glass beads to playing cards.

• Yes, the goal of players having influence over the SIS is not fully supported. Again, I really should have left that out, since it's more of our suggested way of GMing, not anything hard and fast in the rules.

• Your Attributes determine your maximum "refresh" total for a particular type of Token. Say you have a Body of 23, and during the course of a game, you spend ten of those Tokens, leaving you with only 13 Body Tokens. You still have a Body of 23, though. Now, say the refresh rate for your campaign is 1 Token/day. For a game that happens 5 days later, you will have 18 Body Tokens. For one that's 28 days later, you'll have 23 Body Tokens (your limit, based on your Body score). You can have more Tokens than your Attribute, but only as the result of a lost challenge, not from the standard refresh rate. The normal limit for bidding is your Attribute score, but if you need/want to spend more than that, you can, but at a stiff penalty (it costs you an extra Token for each point bid over your Attribute). Attributes get as high as you are willing to pay for.

• New players start with Tokens equal to their Attributes, which could be anywhere from 1 to 97 at character creation (either extreme is unlikely, though, and most Attributes will be around 10-30). A bid of one Token has almost no chance of winning, unless the other player doesn't care about the conflict at all, and bids zero. So far, in our playtests, the highest single bid was 30, and they are usually around 10.

• The only real way to gain Tokens outside of challenges is by the standard, between-games automatic refresh. GMs can reward in-game actions with Tokens, though. So really, if you want to build up your pool of Tokens, you must get involved in conflicts that other players care about winning (and then you have to lose them). You can spend Tokens for other effects.

• Damage is healed in two main ways: Body, Mind, and Heart Tokens can be spent to reduce Soul damage (or Soul can be spent to heal Body, Mind, and Heart damage), or "healed" naturally over time.

• We haven't done any testing of large group challenges yet, so I can't really answer your questions with anything other than the way I think we're going at the moment. Let's give an example: A, B, C, and D are all involved in a group conflict. The declared stakes are:

A - Do Body damage to C
B - Pick A's pocket and get away safely with his wallet
C - Subdue A, B, and D with a magic effect
D - Get away from the conflict safely

They all bid, and get this:

A - Bids 12 Soul Tokens
B - Bids 8 Mind Tokens
C - Bids 6 Soul Tokens
D - Bids 7 Body Tokens

The narration:

A - Wins his stakes, and does damage (equal to the Skill he used) to C
B - His stakes are not negated by A's success, so he successfully picks A's pocket in the confusion
C - Lowest bidder, his stakes will not happen
D - His stakes are not negated by A's or B's success, so he gets away

Token exchange:

A - His stakes only affected C, so he gives his 12 Soul Tokens to C
B - His stakes only affected A, so he gives his 8 Mind Tokens to A
C - He only received tokens from A and D, so he gives 3 Soul Tokens each to A and D
D - His stakes affected A, B, and C, so he gives them each 2 Body Tokens, and keeps the seventh

• GMs can participate in challenges. They have a non-allocated pool of Tokens that they have to use for any character they play. GMs are effectively a "Token bank," as they do not refresh between games. So, if the players have been beating the GMs in challenges regularly, it's going to become increasingly difficult to do so, or vice versa.

Does the system include alternate systems for special rules-altering abilities? You mention Magic as a special ability that can kill characters. Will there be others? Can I acquire a mystic familiar that can take Mind Damage on my behalf, or can I know a special fighting technique that treats my Body bids as one token higher?

In regard to mechanical character development, how much can my character improve over a year of bi-weekly play?

So. If I was being really picky about the group challenge, this is what I'd say:

Andrew wrote:
A - Do Body damage to C
B - Pick A's pocket and get away safely with his wallet
C - Subdue A, B, and D with a magic effect
D - Get away from the conflict safely

They all bid, and get this:

A - Bids 12 Soul Tokens
B - Bids 8 Mind Tokens
C - Bids 6 Soul Tokens
D - Bids 7 Body Tokens

The narration:

A - Wins his stakes, and does damage (equal to the Skill he used) to C
B - His stakes are not negated by A's success, so he successfully picks A's pocket in the confusion
C - Lowest bidder, his stakes will not happen
D - His stakes are not negated by A's or B's success, so he gets away

Token exchange:

A - His stakes only affected C, so he gives his 12 Soul Tokens to C
B - His stakes only affected A, so he gives his 8 Mind Tokens to A
C - He only received tokens from A and D, so he gives 3 Soul Tokens each to A and D
D - His stakes affected A, B, and C, so he gives them each 2 Body Tokens, and keeps the seventh

Andrew wrote: So really, if you want to build up your pool of Tokens, you must get involved in conflicts that other players care about winning (and then you have to lose them).

I'll sneak in a couple of thoughts before I disappear for the weekend.

With Attributes that range from 10 to 30, let's say a starting PC averages 20 in each Attribute.

If I understand correctly, that player is carrying around 80 Tokens. And this is before I improve my character by 65% over one year, leaping to 132 Tokens. Whoa. That's a lot to carry and organize.

Did your playtest use actual physical tokens in these numbers? What did you use? How did you carry and organize them for the duration of the game?

Also, I don't see how anyone could ever take someone's Attribute out of play when Attributes are so big, and challenges inflict only one damage. You'd have to win 20 challenges in a row to take out the Body of one starting-PC-equivalent NPC. Won't this result in protracted combat scenes?

How would it change your game system if you radically decreased the potential range of attribute sizes? Say, 1 to 20, with a starting character averaging 5.

On the topic of group challenges, I encountered some pretty complex stakes during the second playtest of my system. Beware Player A in this scenario:

Player A: For my stakes, I do one Body Damage to C.
Player B: For my stakes, I pickpocket A and get away with his wallet.
Player A: Well then, I want to change my stakes. I do one Body Damage to C and avoid getting pickpocketed by B.
Player C: I cast sleep on you all! Mwahaha! Er, that's my stake.
Player D: I just want to escape.
Player A: In that case, my stake is to Damage C, Avoid B and Stop D from escaping.

I'm addressing that issue by saying in the rules that a Stake is a "simple sentence." There's wiggle room in that phrase, but not so much that Stakes can escalate in oneupmanship too absurdly.

Perhaps also to simplify the trading of tokens in group challenges, the highest bid could trade with the lowest, the second-highest could trade with the second-lowest, and so on through the group: an odd man out trades with nobody.

Also, I was unclear in this question:

me wrote: Does the system include alternate systems for special rules-altering abilities? You mention Magic as a special ability that can kill characters. Will there be others? Can I acquire a mystic familiar that can take Mind Damage on my behalf, or can I know a special fighting technique that treats my Body bids as one token higher?

I apologise for the line-by-line nature of my response, but there's just so much here, I think it's necessary.

Graham wrote: First quick question: wouldn't it have been easier for D to simply not enter the conflict?

Graham wrote: So...firstly, can I just clarify that the lowest bid will always lose, even if his stakes don't contradict any other stakes?

Graham wrote: Secondly, what if the bidding had been:

A - Bids 12 Soul Tokens
B - Bids 8 Mind Tokens
C - Bids 7 Soul Tokens
D - Bids 6 Body Tokens

Then D would have lost, clearly. But would it then be the case that A does damage to C, B picks A's pocket, but then C subdues everyone else by magic? Technically, C's stakes don't contradict anyone else's. It's a slightly strange situation.

Graham wrote: And again, I have a slight practicality worry with this. The reason I really liked the idea of swapping tokens is because it's so quick. This looks much slower and I'm wondering if there's a quicker method. Is there a way that, say, only the highest and lowest bidders swap tokens? Or the highest gives his tokens to the lowest, then the lowest gives his to the second lowest, and so on up the line?

W wrote: Perhaps also to simplify the trading of tokens in group challenges, the highest bid could trade with the lowest, the second-highest could trade with the second-lowest, and so on through the group: an odd man out trades with nobody.

wrote: Er, but above you said that the winner of the conflict gave the tokens bid to the loser, and the loser gave the tokens bid to the winner (see points 6 and 7 in your first post)? Is this a mistake on your part, or am I missing the meaning of #7?

wrote: Notice that if I'm not misunderstanding point #7, it will be possible for the winning bidder to end up with MORE tokens than before the conflict if there are multiple individuals he is in conflict with. Say A bids 12 tokens, and B and C bid 7 tokens and 8 tokens respectively. A wins the bid and distributes his bid tokens to B and C. B and C then give their bid tokens to A, who gets a return of 15 tokens.

W wrote: With Attributes that range from 10 to 30, let's say a starting PC averages 20 in each Attribute.

If I understand correctly, that player is carrying around 80 Tokens. And this is before I improve my character by 65% over one year, leaping to 132 Tokens. Whoa. That's a lot to carry and organize.

W wrote: Did your playtest use actual physical tokens in these numbers? What did you use? How did you carry and organize them for the duration of the game?

W wrote: Also, I don't see how anyone could ever take someone's Attribute out of play when Attributes are so big, and challenges inflict only one damage. You'd have to win 20 challenges in a row to take out the Body of one starting-PC-equivalent NPC. Won't this result in protracted combat scenes?

W wrote: How would it change your game system if you radically decreased the potential range of attribute sizes? Say, 1 to 20, with a starting character averaging 5.

W wrote: On the topic of group challenges, I encountered some pretty complex stakes during the second playtest of my system. Beware Player A in this scenario:

Player A: For my stakes, I do one Body Damage to C.
Player B: For my stakes, I pickpocket A and get away with his wallet.
Player A: Well then, I want to change my stakes. I do one Body Damage to C and avoid getting pickpocketed by B.
Player C: I cast sleep on you all! Mwahaha! Er, that's my stake.
Player D: I just want to escape.
Player A: In that case, my stake is to Damage C, Avoid B and Stop D from escaping.

I'm addressing that issue by saying in the rules that a Stake is a "simple sentence." There's wiggle room in that phrase, but not so much that Stakes can escalate in oneupmanship too absurdly.

W wrote: What I meant to ask was not about character death, but about special abilities. Magic is an ability with special rules. Summoned creatures, you say, introduce special rules. Can I have special rules because I know kung fu, or because I can read minds, or because I have wealth beyond mortal measure? Where is the line drawn between "the standard bidding system handles this, just add Color" and "this situation needs to be reflected mechanically?"

I think the physical representation of Tokens does matter: it has a direct impact on the handling time of the system. The easier Tokens are to store, retrieve, count and manipulate, the more elegant the system becomes.

But that's my only quibble at this point. I don't think I can ask any more intelligent questions before I see how things change. I look forward to reading your next revision!