Dirty Virgins (which’ll probably get renamed Desperate Virgins) is a game about maidens trying to sully their reputations before a dragon eats them in the morning. In a previous thread I figured out some stuff about how to determine which virgin gets eaten. I also said this:

Everyone starts with 30 Honour & 30 Shame.

I've started this thread because I'd like to know if I'm heading in a direction that'll create game balance while allowing a variety of tactical options from the players.

In Dirty Virgins, the character with the highest Honour at the end of the game gets eaten. Shame is a pool that you divide up into Shameful Acts. The more Shameful Acts you commit in the game, the more votes you have to increase other virgins’ Honour.

Something about starting everybody off at the same Honour & Shame didn’t sit right with me. So I’ve gone back and experimented with the original idea of allowing players to set it for themselves on a sliding scale, from 1Honour / 59 Shame to 59 Honour / 1 Shame.*

That seems to provide a whole bunch of tactical options. Setting your Honour low gives you less votes, initially makes you less likely to be eaten but also makes you a target.  Likewise, setting your Honour extremely high gives you voting immunity to start with - immunity that may or may not be end up being contested, if my solo play tests are anything to go by.  People in the middle ground seemed to get more votes than people at the extremes, which gives them their own edge.

My question is - have I overlooked some optimal min-maxing setting that smart players should choose?  See, I want this game to be balanced, with a variety of evenly-matched strategies that could lead to success.

* I also might go back to having 40 points to allocate between Honour & Shame (thanks for the terms, Jason Morningstar, they are awesome), because the game seems like it might run a little long at 60.

I think you're capitalizing nicely (and explicitly!) on the notion that players gang up on the person who appears closest to winning the game.  Because you are closest to winning the game when you have least ability to proceed toward that goal (and most ability to be slammed) I think you're going to get some wonderfully Survivoresque situations of betrayal, group dysfunction and manipulation.

Do you want to encourage a totally non-binding round of people making promises to each other about the way they'll vote?  I mean, that's half the fun of Survivor, after all ... and you could definitely do worse than steal what they do well.

At the moment, I have a 'free and clear' phase where people can discuss anything they want about the voting - including proposing alliances & all that other Survivor goodness. I absolutely think that conversation is necessary to the game - although I should push your "totally non-binding round of people making promises to each other about the way they'll vote" concept a bit more forcefully in the next draft.

All of that, though, is currently part of a single discussion that happens face-to-face at the table. Were you thinking more of a classic 'everyone goes off for a bit and talks in their little huddles' Survivor + Diplomacy phase?

Oh, absolutely.  It serves a dual purpose:  alliance-building and gossip about the shameful things the virgins have been doing, and are secretly proud of.

In fact, come to think about it, alliance building and gossip are really the same thing in this game, aren't they?

I've been pondering this game for a while, struggling with why I wanted so much to love it and couldn't, and I think I've figured out why, but I think it's at a deeper level than the Honor/Shame mechanics (cool as they are). So I'm gonna kick over the table here.

What I love: the freakin' beautiful concept. Everyone realizes this game is hardcore feminist satire, right? I keep imagining the Town Fathers explaining the situation the day before, and a hard-eyed virgin going, "Waitasec. So if I'm a really good girl and play by all your rules, I get to be eaten alive by a what?" (Plus the added tragedy that, as always, the incentive for the oppressed to band together is outweighed by the incentive to throw one another to the wolves). N.B. that you should never say this explicitly in the rules! Let players figure it out for themselves.

What I don't love: the mechanics are really linear. I know, I know, there's a tradeoff between Shame and Honor, plus lots of room for interplayer intrigue -- but in the end, Honor kills you. So ultimately the game is a problem in maximizing a single value, which is (as I understand mathematics) by definition a solveable problem, which means a problem with a finite number of optimal solutions (maybe one, maybe several), which means any complications you create are just delaying the inevitable point when someone solves the equation and the game breaks.*

In other words, there's no Fruitful Void. As I said in that discussion on Vincent's blog:

me, only earlier and somewhere else wrote: Both Narrativism and Gamism strike me as "dilemma" play: if there's an obvious best answer (morally, for Narrativism; tactically, for Gamism), play dies; the enjoyment is in making difficult choices among equally valid but imperfect options. A Gamist design or scenario that had (explicit or implicit) a single optimal strategy would be the equivalent of a Narrativist game where the designer or GM had already answered the Premise....

Sydney, thanks for that. It's insightful stuff. Your observation about the core of the satire is something I hadn't even articulated to myself. I'm gunna have to take some time & digest it all.

The next area I was thinking of working on was enlivening the shared imaginary space. Your comments may tie into that. What I mean is that in both the current version & the proposed structure, there's a clear objective: not to get eaten. But ...

... in the current version, it's just a fun voting-off romp to see who does get eaten.
... in your proposed structure, there'd be difficult choices to make. Introducing concepts like friendship, loyalty (or whatever) make the resolution more meaningful. And that, I think, makes the game's SIS more vivid.

Which is exciting, but damn - I was hoping this'd be an easy to edit and publish kind of game. Now I'm having to think about it and stuff. :)

"Of course it's hard. The 'hard' is what makes it great. If it were easy, everyone would do it" -- A League of Their Own

I know the feeling. You & others (especially Unco Lober's group!) had strong positive responses to the current version of apocalypse girl, and most of the problems you identified would be easy to fix -- but to make it really do what I want it to do, I'm struggling to design a relationship-mapping mechanic.

And thanks for being gracious about my rant. Thinking about your game and Tobias's helped me form some ideas in my mind, and I unceremoniously dumped them all into your thread.

N.B.: Notice how making the fiction of the game richer is tied to making the mechanics more robust? Classic Forge theory in action.

Hi!
  Well, I think for it to be "realistic" I think that honour and shame should be the same stat...
  I mean, how could you be both shamed and honorable at the same time.
  Also, for this genre, seems like hour should go down as a character gains skill goes up...
  In the context of the situation as described, it seems like the there are a few solutions:
Lie - I'm not a virgin
Confess - Confess to secret affair with another villager
Get busy - Rectify the situation
Get married - I mean, the consumation is defense
Call daddy - Get some man in the community to stand up for you (Isn;t that the classic story, dozens of daughters get sacrificed until the kings daughter's name gets picked. Then a knight is engaged).
Volunteer - Think of it like collecting hearts in the card game of hearts...
  Just some ideas