Contenders
By Joe J. Prince
16 pages, pdf.

I've divided this into two parts.  The first is an analysis of the design of the game.  The second is a review of the game.

Statement of Bias:  I approached the game from a fairly strong Hard Core Gamist point of view.

The Design of Contenders

I'll be using terms from the Glossary and from the RPG Design Patterns book.

Each character consists of:

Four Attributes:
  1.  Pain (also a Conflicted Gauge)
  2.  Hope
  3.  Reputation
  4.  Cash (also a Resource)

Four Skills:
  5.  Technique
  6.  Power
  7.  Cover
  8.  Conditioning

One Common Gift:
  9.  Connection

Pain and Reputation are notable in being one-way gauges -- they can only ever increase.  I'm inclined to call these ratchet gauges, with the ever-increasing ones more specifically being ratchet-up gauges.  Hope is almost a ratchet-up gauge, but there is one specific Currency process to spend Hope.

(Skills in general are ratchet-up gauges -- many systems do not have a process to decrement their rank.)

Character creation consists of defining some character Colour elements, and two point-buy processes, each with their own pool.

Game play is broken into acts.  Each player gets one turn in each act.  On their turn, they choose to execute a particular type of scene, which I will enumerate below.  This choice of scene type is the Intent phase of the IIEE process.

Many of the scene types involve a particular task resolution system.  The mechanic of a "dice pool" is fairly well understood.  This game uses something I'll call a "draw pool".  Instead of, for example, having a dice pool of 5d6, Contenders would have a pool of five draws from a standard deck.  Red cards count as successes.  The task is resolved by giving an opponent his own draw pool, and then comparing successes.  The results are usually (but not universally) defined as follows:

The player has more successes that the opponent:  Win.  Something good happens.
The player has no successes, and the opponent has at least one success:  Lose.  Something bad happens.
Neither of the above:  Tie.  Something good and something bad happen.

Each scene (generally) is a contest.  The currency process used to define the draw pools for the player and his opponent are unique to each scene, as are the success rewards and failure rewards.

Connection: spend Cash vs Pain -> Hope or Pain or Hope+Pain
Thug: Pain vs desired Cash -> desired Cash or Pain or Cash+Pain
Training: spend Cash -> Skill increase
Promotion: n/a
Fight: (complex) -> Rep and Cash and (Hope or Pain or Hope+Pain)

Training has no Fortune (nor contest) involved.  Promotion does involve currency processes.  Fights are complex enough to analyze on their own.

The fight scene consists of a number of boxing rounds (determined during Promotion.)  Each round, both fighters pick an ephemeral stance, as follows:

Aggressive: Dominate +1 Damage +5
Balanced: Dominate +3 Damage +3
Defensive: Dominate +5 Damage +1
Street: Dominate +4 Damage +4 +Warning

Each fighter gets a draw pool equal to Dominate plus Technique.  Whoever gets the most successes in the draw deals damage; in a tie, both fighters deal damage.

The draw pool for damage equals Damage plus Power.  The fighter taking damage gets a draw pool equal to his Cover.  The Cover successes are subtracted from the damage successes, and enter a special Currency process:

0: 0 VP
1-2: 1 VP
3-4: 2 VP
5+: You Win.

Where VP are Victory Points, which are a special gauge with a lifetime of the boxing match.

Each VP can be treated as a -1 penalty to a skill of the opponent, in a damage-like relation.

At the start of the second and subsequent rounds, each character takes a -1 penalty to Conditioning.  If their Conditioning is already at zero, they take a -1 penalty to every Skill instead.

The Street stance results in a Warning.  The other fighter receives one VP for each Warning, and the fighter loses by disqualification if he accumulates three Warnings.

If both fighters reach the end of the last round, the one with the most VP wins.  In the case of a tie, the match is a draw.

There is a special maneuver (similar to a Safety Valve) called Bringing the Pain, useable by each fighter once per match.  The fighter gains Dominate equal to Pain and Damage equal to Pain - 1.  If the fighter wins (deals five or more damage) by using this maneuver, he gains +1 Pain.

There is another special maneuver called Burning Hope.  A fighter may spend one point of Hope to heal Skill damage equal to his Hope.  This is the only mechanism for decreasing Hope.

The endgame is triggered by any character's Reputation reaching 9.  Each player gets one more scene, and then a final fight scene occurs, in which Hope rewards are doubled.

At the end of the fight scene, a Karma contest determines if the player has won:

Hope > Pain: Win
Hope = Pain: Tie
Hope < Pain: Loss

That's my design analysis of the game.  My review of the game follows.  I'll roughly review items in the order they are presented in Contenders.

Character Creation and Stat Buy:  Currently written as "Start with a pool of 6 to divide among 4 stats, but each stat must be at least 1."  This is purely equivalent to a pool of 2 to divide among stats which start at 1.  As a personal preference, I like the latter, but that's just me.

Similarly, with the in-ring styles, one could start with a pool of 6, and 4 stats at 1.

I'm not entirely convinced you should let people start with a Reputation of 3.  Three fights later, they could trigger the endgame, if they're successful.

NPC boxers:  Personally, I don't think they're needed, although I suppose you might need one if you have an odd number of players.  I'd rather seen the PCs beating on each other.  If you do keep them, they don't need Hope, as they can't use it.

Scenes:  The scene process is a good idea, but I think it might need some work.  I'll discuss each scene type.

Connection:  This is a good idea, but as the game is written, there's no reason to ever try to establish more than one Connection.  I'd like to see mechanical support for burning a Connection, which I think is well-supported by the genre conventions.  The kindly old boxing coach mentor dies -- that sort of thing.

Thug Work:  There's is a severe mechanical issue with this.  As far as I can tell, there is no limit to the amount of Cash a player might try to score.  Due to the way the contest resolution system works, he'll get it as long as he gets at least one success, which shouldn't be that hard if he has any significant amount of Pain.  If he has lots of Pain already, he probably won't care if he takes one more point.  It shouldn't be terribly hard to fix, but as it stands, a player can make as much Cash with this as he wants.

Training:  A good solid idea, but I'm not sure spending a whole scene (which is, I would suggest, the most valuable Resource in the game) is worthwhile.  It'll probably become obvious in playtesting if no one ever goes into Training.  It might be worthwhile to award some sort of experience-point-like Resource to fighters after a fight scene, or otherwise introduce a mechanic by which skills can be improved by fighting alone.

Promotion:  There are some problems here, too.  The decisions about how long the match should last is a vital tactical decision, but there are no mechanics (or suggested values) as to how to decide it.  Similarly, there are no suggestions as to how to divide up the purse.  As well, making Promotion a necessary precursor to the Fight scene makes it costly.  I'd suggest that you can do away with this scene entirely and absorb its functionality into the fight scene itself.

I'll get to fight scenes in a moment.

Scenes in general:  I think the system is a bit fragile in that it lends itself to abuse by those who avoid fights entirely (which I'd expect some players to try just out of subversiveness) and those who seek fights incessantly.  I would be tempted to set up the structure of the game so that each player gets a non-fight scene, and then all players are involved in a fight scene.  Repeat until endgame.  This basically is the same structure as the end game.

Fight mechanics.

This is really at the heart of any Hard Core Gamist interest of the game.  I'd first suggest that offensive and defensive stances should change your modifiers to Power and to your *Cover*, rather than Technique.  It doesn't seem thematically consistent to make the most defensive stance the one that is most likely to hit.

The Warning mechanism is probably not sufficient to seriously deter anyone from using Streetfighting all the time (or at least twice.)

Tactically, I think I'd use Streetfighting and Bring the Pain in the first round of every fight I was in, every time.  I haven't rigourously crunched the numbers on it, but I'm pretty confident it's the optimal strategy in almost every situation.  As a result, it's basically no choice at all, and any Gamist challenge is reduced to a pure game of chance while drawing cards.

Yes, you probably gain +1 Pain, but if you also gain +1 Hope for winning, it's not really a penalty.  In the endgame, in which you gain +2 Hope, it's definitely not a penalty, unless you're already doomed.

Due to the way the system is built, it's probably almost always a good idea to apply any VP damage you can do as Conditioning damage.  This isn't entirely a bad thing, but it is one more choice that isn't much of a choice.

Support for Creative Agendas:

Gamist:  I think the game could strongly support Gamist play if some of the mechanical issues are fixed.  As it stands, there are some fairly obvious degenerate Gamist strategies, which potentially reduce it to a game of pure chance.

Narrativist: Despite some dramatic trappings, I don't think the game has much support for players wishing to address a Premise.

Simulationist:  The game is probably too abstract to satisfy players looking for a boxing simulation, although I may be mistaken.  The game may be more successful as a simulation of boxing movies.

In general:  There's a tremendous amount of potential here.  The game as a purity of focus which is wonderful.  I've made a few suggestions about some of the mechanics, but tweaking mechanics is relatively easy.  I think you've got a winner here, and I look forward to giving it a playtest.

Cheers,
Roger

Something else I noticed but forgot to mention:  It appears that a fighter can place a bet against himself.  For the right price, this might encourage a player to 'throw' a match.  I'm not sure if this is intentional or desirable, but I thought I'd mention it.

Cheers,
Roger

Thanks for the feedback Roger,

John Kirk's patterns book is all kinds of useful!
www.legendaryquest.com/

Onto the points-

Roger wrote:

I'm not entirely convinced you should let people start with a Reputation of 3.  Three fights later, they could trigger the endgame, if they're successful.

NPC boxers:  Personally, I don't think they're needed, although I suppose you might need one if you have an odd number of players.  I'd rather seen the PCs beating on each other.  If you do keep them, they don't need Hope, as they can't use it.

Connection:  This is a good idea, but as the game is written, there's no reason to ever try to establish more than one Connection.  I'd like to see mechanical support for burning a Connection, which I think is well-supported by the genre conventions.  The kindly old boxing coach mentor dies -- that sort of thing.

Thug Work:  There's is a severe mechanical issue with this.  As far as I can tell, there is no limit to the amount of Cash a player might try to score.  Due to the way the contest resolution system works, he'll get it as long as he gets at least one success, which shouldn't be that hard if he has any significant amount of Pain.  If he has lots of Pain already, he probably won't care if he takes one more point.  It shouldn't be terribly hard to fix, but as it stands, a player can make as much Cash with this as he wants.

Training:  A good solid idea, but I'm not sure spending a whole scene (which is, I would suggest, the most valuable Resource in the game) is worthwhile.  It'll probably become obvious in playtesting if no one ever goes into Training.  It might be worthwhile to award some sort of experience-point-like Resource to fighters after a fight scene, or otherwise introduce a mechanic by which skills can be improved by fighting alone.

Promotion:  There are some problems here, too.  The decisions about how long the match should last is a vital tactical decision, but there are no mechanics (or suggested values) as to how to decide it.  Similarly, there are no suggestions as to how to divide up the purse.  As well, making Promotion a necessary precursor to the Fight scene makes it costly.  I'd suggest that you can do away with this scene entirely and absorb its functionality into the fight scene itself.

Scenes in general:  I think the system is a bit fragile in that it lends itself to abuse by those who avoid fights entirely (which I'd expect some players to try just out of subversiveness) and those who seek fights incessantly.  I would be tempted to set up the structure of the game so that each player gets a non-fight scene, and then all players are involved in a fight scene.  Repeat until endgame.  This basically is the same structure as the end game.

Fight mechanics.

I'd first suggest that offensive and defensive stances should change your modifiers to Power and to your *Cover*, rather than Technique.  It doesn't seem thematically consistent to make the most defensive stance the one that is most likely to hit.

The Warning mechanism is probably not sufficient to seriously deter anyone from using Streetfighting all the time (or at least twice.)

Tactically, I think I'd use Streetfighting and Bring the Pain in the first round of every fight I was in, every time.  I haven't rigorously crunched the numbers on it, but I'm pretty confident it's the optimal strategy in almost every situation.  As a result, it's basically no choice at all, and any Gamist challenge is reduced to a pure game of chance while drawing cards.

Yes, you probably gain +1 Pain, but if you also gain +1 Hope for winning, it's not really a penalty.  In the endgame, in which you gain +2 Hope, it's definitely not a penalty, unless you're already doomed.

Due to the way the system is built, it's probably almost always a good idea to apply any VP damage you can do as Conditioning damage.  This isn't entirely a bad thing, but it is one more choice that isn't much of a choice.

Support for Creative Agendas:

Gamist:  I think the game could strongly support Gamist play if some of the mechanical issues are fixed.  As it stands, there are some fairly obvious degenerate Gamist strategies, which potentially reduce it to a game of pure chance.

Narrativist: Despite some dramatic trappings, I don't think the game has much support for players wishing to address a Premise.

In general:  There's a tremendous amount of potential here.  The game has a purity of focus which is wonderful.  I've made a few suggestions about some of the mechanics, but tweaking mechanics is relatively easy.  I think you've got a winner here, and I look forward to giving it a playtest.

Cheers,
Roger