Hey all, if anyone is interested in following along, I'll be documenting my attempts to get my group into a "Novel"-sized campaign of SHOCK. My group has folks that are really into SF, including the wife of an Uber SF Geek: We're talking "He hits the "GenCon" of SF every year, no matter what country it's in, and his wife pretty much shares that love", and others.  This is a pretty laid back gaming group, and we've never played any game where someone essentially "GMs" someone else.  There's lots of newness here.

Anyway, here's the first post:
http://zigguratbuilder.livejournal.com/22414.html

Nothing major yet, we still haven't set up completely (Tagonists are taking shape, but not statted out yet. Antagonists will be exceedingly simple to birthe, I think).

Anyway, if you want to see how this kind of game can take shape, feel free to take a peek. I'll try to update roughly weekly.

-Andy

Cool, Andy! I look forward to the full AP. It sounds like you're off to a solid start. Vincent and I are going to do some playtesting today that will, I hope, clarify a weirdness in CR. I'll let you know what the results turn out to be.

Hey dude, you hit a question that took me off-guard on my LJ and that I totally missed on my first few readings of the game:

That the Praxis scales are the same for Everyone.  That was a little hard to swallow, as especially in a game with 5 players (which probably usually breaks into 2 issues, 3 shocks or 3 issues, 2 shocks) it's hard to imagine that every character in every field will address problems in the exact same scale. 

On my first reading, I thought the praxis scale was seperate for each character, to show how that character dealt with the world. That made more "sense" to me from the whol background of "characters are made up of jumbles of different unshared stuff" sensibilities. But thinking on it more, making them the same across all characters makes a kind of sense.

But still, I'd love to hear more about the rationale behind that. And I was wondered if you experimented with, say, taking the top praxis scale and make that the same for ALL the characters in the story, and take the bottom praxis scale and make it:
1) Different for each character, to show how that protag personally "deals" (to get a more personal level of story), or
2) Different for each character, but shared by other Protags that were created in that intersection. (so, in my case, the two protags that are in "Economic Stratification" and "Genetic Manipulation" will in fact share the exact same praxis scale, but for the characters in other boxes, they'll only share the top part).

Any thoughts to say option 2?  It would seem to hold up easier over a longer campaign (Novel, Series, etc), but I'd like to see if you had done any thinking on that.

-Andy

Mechanically, you have to be able to challenge other players on a particular scale. This was truer in previous versions of the rules.

See, the thing is, your dude is about Violence over Negotiation. My dude is the opposite. That means we each have an interest in getting into a conflict with each other. We get to see in the course of play what those moral stances mean.

I've been considering the things you're suggesting here. They'll require tweaks one way or another; the rules right now are unclear on when you can use a particular Feature on offense or defense. I'll have a clear answer to you by this evening, but rest assured that your suggestions are under consideration.

Mechanically, you have to be able to challenge other players on a particular scale. This was truer in previous versions of the rules.

See, the thing is, your dude is about Violence over Negotiation. My dude is the opposite. That means we each have an interest in getting into a conflict with each other. We get to see in the course of play what those moral stances mean.

I've been considering the things you're suggesting here. They'll require tweaks one way or another; the rules right now are unclear on when you can use a particular Feature on offense or defense. I'll have a clear answer to you by this evening, but rest assured that your suggestions are under consideration.

How about: all Praxis scales need to be shared with someone. That would cover the spectrum from all the scales being the same to widely individualized scales, to be decided by the particular group of players.

Mikael wrote:
How about: all Praxis scales need to be shared with someone. That would cover the spectrum from all the scales being the same to widely individualized scales, to be decided by the particular group of players.

Andy wrote:

Mikael wrote:
How about: all Praxis scales need to be shared with someone. That would cover the spectrum from all the scales being the same to widely individualized scales, to be decided by the particular group of players.

Well, I do think that, for the function of the story-world, that having a Praxis scale shared by EVERYONE is cool, perhaps even "critically important".  It's like a social commentary on how, from priveledged to poor, from East to West, everyone in the Known World often addresses problems along this single scale for the purposes of this story.  I really dig that.

After kinda "sleeping on it", I think I'm a little more open to having all characters share both praxis scales... but I think I need some solid reasoning to make it passable for my group for a longer-term story; that is, not just so that "Protags have the ability to fight against each other", but more along the lines of "All Praxis scales are shared for all Protags: This is important to SHOCK because in Social Science fiction yadda yadda yadda mini cool explanatory essay yadda."

Andy wrote:

Mechanically, you have to be able to challenge other players on a particular scale. This was truer in previous versions of the rules.

Here, do you mean the Protag and Antag? Or Protag and Protag?  If the latter, how have things changed?

Also, could you still have a conflict between protag and protag using the "second praxis set": I have honesty vs lying, and Jake has violence vs peace... Couldn't we still play out our conflict against these, with winner getting his way? Or am I getting too close to PTA land there?

See, the thing is, your dude is about Violence over Negotiation. My dude is the opposite. That means we each have an interest in getting into a conflict with each other. We get to see in the course of play what those moral stances mean.

Absolutely. And I can totally see that with fewer characters in a more focused, shorter story: And already we've started to see ideas for praxis scales and how protags will be at opposite ends of them.  However, in our group we currently have as protags:
a genertically modded child
a freedom fighter who is overthrowing economically corrupt govts (these two share the same "box" on the shock table)
a genetic higher caste member, sequestered from all lower castes as "the man"
an alien agent in a robotic body of sorts
a genetic lower caste member who works as a slave for the higher castes

With the above, I can think of a few shared praxis scales, but to say that all the characters will resolve all conflicts in the same four ways... it's focused, but perhaps doesn't fit what we have.  Which may be cool, and we're turning the thing on its ear by making characters before situation.

If this is the case, though, I'd almost say that, if you plan on playing with more than 3 players, that character generation should state that you make your praxis scale first, then look at Shock vs Issue and place your protag.  This will keep people with their eye firmly planted on that praxis scale, so that you're not left with 5-6 characters and trying to figure out "what common baselines do these radically diverse characters all share?"

I can think of a few, like Control vs Autonomy, or Priveledge vs "By Your Own Hand", but it'll be hard to shoehorn all these five characters into the same praxis scales in a way that will be satisfying for all the players.  I'm sure we can come up with one common one that everyone would agree on (the "World Praxis Scale"), but after that it would be hard, and I'd fear (though only playtest will reveal) that they'd only end up using the praxis scale that they think fits their concept closer anyway, largely ignoring the other scale.

However, I'm a big fan of Just Two Scales.  I think three or more per character would lose the overall focus.

I've been considering the things you're suggesting here. They'll require tweaks one way or another; the rules right now are unclear on when you can use a particular Feature on offense or defense. I'll have a clear answer to you by this evening, but rest assured that your suggestions are under consideration.

here, with features, are you primarily referring to Player vs Player?  In that case I can't really see a diff between offence and defense: You're still rolling extra d10s for "your side". Or am I missing a new rule?

Hey man, thanks for your replies and all!  I feel like I'm walking this tightrope, where this is going on:

* Joshua is cool. SHOCK looks cool. I will play shock and give hopefully good feedback from the "average gaming table".
* SHOCK isn't completely ironed out yet. To get the best experience without drift, and sticking as close to designer goals as possible, I have to be clear on the rules.
* The rules changed quite a bit from one 0.2 revision to the next (not incomprehensibly, mind you). To pursue the above, I have to ask Joshua clarifying issues on this.
* Joshua spending time to clarify changes that have already been made might add stress to him and take away time from his overall project.
* However, Joshua never *asked* me to playtest for him, I just kind of took it upon myself, so it may be asking a lot of him to keep me up to speed.

So, the above are all floating around in my head, and I hope I'm not straining you too much by these ongoing questions on stuff you've already fixed.  If so, it's totally cool, just let me know and we'll play with what we currently have.  I totally don't want to be That Questions Guy who bothers Coleridge from completing Xubla Xhan. :-)

Anyway, with that in mind, a couple followup questions, most of which are probably in your notes already. I'll reread both 0.2.2 Doc and 0.2.4 Addendum to make sure I'm not wasting your time covering old ground. Also, I was going back and forth with you between forums and email: I'll keep all my questions to you in the Forum from this point on just to keep things consistent.

Fluff questions:
1) Just curious, why is the person on the Right your Antag? Is it because, since they sit close to each other, it creates a stage-like enviornment for the others to "view" like a "play"?  Or so they can be next to each other in case there's kissing? :-)

Re: Conflict
You roll a number of d10s equal to the number of Features you've got on the scale you're using to get what you want. If your opponent is rolling on the other scale, you roll d4s equal to the number of Features you've got on that scale. Antags roll dice equal to the number of Credits they spend, plus 1d10 and 1d4.

... No, I've thought about it: the problem here is that you skipped a part of World Creation and now things are predictably out of order. Even though your character concepts are interesting, they're broken because they don't share Praxis. Since you make Praxis in World Creation, before you make *Tags, you'll be thinking about how these characters work given those avenues of expression.

Sorry, man. I think you gotta ditch the characters, make Praxis, then make new *Tags.

Yep. That's why you don't use too many Shocks at once, too.

Fuck I hate not being able to edit posts after I think things out a little longer.

I still have questions on PROTAG vs ANTAG (the part about antags now getting 1d10 and a 1d4 is throwing me off a bit), but here's my followup on PROTAG vs PROTAG:

My main question is, what do you do with those 2d4s in my example below? Like previous rulesets on Protag vs Antag conflict, do you simply take the highest 1d4 and move the Protag's result along the praxis scale "towards failure" appropriately?

Also, on my "who wins" questions: Duh, if both win then they both Win, as the stakes aren't mutually exclusive.

-Andy

Dude, I'm totally into you playtesting. Writing this stuff for your benefit helps me figure out how to explain it. I write weird games, it turns out, and it's good to have to explain it to someone.

OK, here's what I think is confusing you:

Both parties declare their Intent (née Stakes) at the beginning of the Conflict.

e.g.
Alice wants to talk the terrorists down from their demands. She's Negotiating (i.e. on the scale described below).
Bob wants his terrorists to get what they want. He's acting Passionately.

Both decide what Praxis Scale they're using.
Alice is using Violence vs. Negotiation
Bob is using Reason vs. Passion

The dice they have:
They each have 1d10 and 1d4.

Alice has two additional dice, named "I can read your emotions" and "I'm willing to make sacrifices". They're on the Scale she's using to accomplish her goals, so she's rolling those as additional d10s.
Bob has three additional dice on the second Scale, "The Russian Federation killed my sister", "Chechnya deserves its freedom" and "Power comes from the barrel of a gun" and is rolling those as additional d10s.

Alice has three Features on the second scale, Reason vs. Passion. They have names but I'm not going to make them up. So she gets an additional 3d4.
Bob has two additional Features, so he gets 2d4.

Note: If they were rolling on the same scale and each had, say, three dice, they could choose how many were d10s and how many were d4s.

What the dice do
d10s place your efforts on the Scale.
d4s are used to alter your opposition's dice. Protagonists can choose which d4 to use. Antagonists must choose the largest one.

How to read the dice
If the die falls in the end you declared you were using, your opposition moves the result by the number on hir d4: the largest one if the Antag player is rolling it; whichever one you like, if a Protag player is rolling it.
• If the die is still in the area you declared, you have accomplished your Intent.
• If the die is in the opposite area, you have failed to accomplish your Intent.
• If the die is exactly on the number on your scale, the Intent is not resolved. Increase the intensity of the Conflict — someone's fighting back unexpectedly, a hostage panics, a helicopter gets shot down.

What you can do about it
You can risk one of your Links to roll your die again. Narrate how the Link is risked — "Commando Cody rushes in. If he survives, he'll lose his confidence in me as a commander," or "I kiss the cross around my neck. If I lose this, I'll lose my faith," and reroll. Either the Protag who owns the Link or hir Antag can risk it. Other Protags can't. Write down a new Feature on the same Scale you're using to roll. Only roll 1d10. The Antag then pays to roll more d4s.

Fallout

You gain a Feature when:
• You lose a Conflict. You may write a new Feature on the Scale on which you lost it. If you can't think of a new Feature for the character, you don't get the die.
• You risk a Link. This means that, when you end a Conflict, you stand to gain three dice as a Protag if you lose both conflicts.
• Note that Antags do not gain dice. They gain Features, but these don't turn into dice. Only Credits turn into dice for the Antag.

The Antag regains a credit when:
• Sie loses a conflict

Remember: d10s are for doing stuff. They're offensive. D4s are for keeping your opposition from succeeding.

The Number of Shocks
In a short story, more than one Shock is distracting. You wind up with characters that have nothing to do with each other. There's not enough time for them to get together, really. Save it for 5+ session games. I think I called that "Novel" length. And even then, start with no more than two and cash out characters to bring in new Shocks so they're always relevant.

Player Sheets
I'll get you the new ones. They have a space for Story Goals and other goodies, besides.

Great explanation.  I think that resolves all the questions I had.  Just two comments:

Joshua wrote:
• If the die is exactly on the number on your scale, the Intent is not resolved. Increase the intensity of the Conflict — someone's fighting back unexpectedly, a hostage panics, a helicopter gets shot down.

You can risk one of your Links to roll your die again. Narrate how the Link is risked — "Commando Cody rushes in. If he survives, he'll lose his confidence in me as a commander," or "I kiss the cross around my neck. If I lose this, I'll lose my faith," and reroll. Either the Protag who owns the Link or hir Antag can risk it. Other Protags can't. Write down a new Feature on the same Scale you're using to roll. Only roll 1d10. The Antag then pays to roll more d4s.

Another update (from last week) on my LJ. Tomorrow we being "the roleplaying":
http://zigguratbuilder.livejournal.com/23512.html

All in all, good stuff.  We got our Praxis scales in alignment, made up riveting protags, made up solid, change-driving antags, added a lot more world/minutia detail. We also tested Issue/Shock ownership, and came up with some cool Features and Links to boot.

This week's ideas:
1) I'm thinking the Shock Grid should have much, much larger boxes.
2) I'm using a large sheet of sketch paper, with the shock grid in the middle, and minutia all over the place. So far, it's working great.
3) We had some problems thinking of applicable and useful praxis scales. We agreed that we'd love to see a page full of sample praxis scales, with like a sentence about the setting that they reflect, to get the brain-juices flowing.

This week's questions:
1) At the top of the Antag sheet there are praxis scales.  This is just to record this Antag's Protag's praxis scales, right? (so that the player doesn't have to keep looking on the other guy's sheet to see what his scores are).
2) Starting Features and Links: What's the new rules on these? This seems to have changed a few times, too. We went with 4 features (2 for each praxis scale) and 2 links for each character.
3) Does the Antag have to be a Person? Or can it be "A Bureau"? One of the protags wanted to have an Antag of basically "The NSA"... it didn't seem to fit with the "must be sentient" collary, so we made it "The Assistant Director of the NSA"... however, we were all thinking that that just doesn't quite fit, as this bureau is supposed to be sort of faceless. But in the long run, it won't really hurt.

Next session is tomorrow (Thursday), and that will be the dice explanation and starting off scenes!

Thanks!

Andy wrote:
Another update (from last week) on my LJ. Tomorrow we being "the roleplaying":
http://zigguratbuilder.livejournal.com/23512.html

All in all, good stuff.  We got our Praxis scales in alignment, made up riveting protags, made up solid, change-driving antags, added a lot more world/minutia detail. We also tested Issue/Shock ownership, and came up with some cool Features and Links to boot.

This week's ideas:
1) I'm thinking the Shock Grid should have much, much larger boxes.

2) I'm using a large sheet of sketch paper, with the shock grid in the middle, and minutia all over the place. So far, it's working great.

3) We had some problems thinking of applicable and useful praxis scales. We agreed that we'd love to see a page full of sample praxis scales, with like a sentence about the setting that they reflect, to get the brain-juices flowing.

This week's questions:
1) At the top of the Antag sheet there are praxis scales.  This is just to record this Antag's Protag's praxis scales, right? (so that the player doesn't have to keep looking on the other guy's sheet to see what his scores are).

2) Starting Features and Links: What's the new rules on these? This seems to have changed a few times, too. We went with 4 features (2 for each praxis scale) and 2 links for each character.

3) Does the Antag have to be a Person? Or can it be "A Bureau"? One of the protags wanted to have an Antag of basically "The NSA"... it didn't seem to fit with the "must be sentient" collary, so we made it "The Assistant Director of the NSA"... however, we were all thinking that that just doesn't quite fit, as this bureau is supposed to be sort of faceless. But in the long run, it won't really hurt.

Next session is tomorrow (Thursday), and that will be the dice explanation and starting off scenes!

Nope! The Antag has Scales, too. But instead of calculating by the number of Features the Antag has, you calculate by the number of Credits paid.

Does this make sense to you? If not, there's a big, big, bit problem in the way I've described CR.

Protag rolls d10s to succeed in the Protag Intent, d4s to thwart the Antag Intent.
Antag rolls d10s to succeed in the Antag Intent, d4s to thwart the Protag Intent.

You actually get 1d10 and 1d4 for free, Protag and Antag both.

Everything else is right.

Setting Antag scales totally, 100%, has to do with context. Your examples are all perfectly reasonable.

j0!

So, we had another session last night after working on our antags.  We went over the minutia creation and how they come into conflicts, conflicts themselves, and how experience works.  We didn't go over Dirty Tricks yet.  We also decided to stick the game somewhere between Short Story and Novel.  "A Novella", two folks said at once.  40 Credits.  No one used any last night, but we were still working things out.

However, right from the start, there was a lot of hangup on how the Praxis Scales work.  It was hard for them (and they brought this point up quite loudly) that it was hard to keep track of which was which, and it was hard for me to explain, "No, a 2 on the "Humanity/Alien Influence Scale" means that you are strong with ALIEN INFLUENCE, not HUMANITY, because there's more filled-in squares on that scale."

It was really hard for them (and I do mean all of them, save Jeremie who didn't say much on the matter; he's pretty adaptable to anything, though) to get used to it. In fact, they asked me to tell you to consider changing it.  "What would you like to see instead?" "Hnmmm... Maybe a pie chart or something?" I dunno about that.  Anyway, I was really behind the sheet-as-is, because I like how they portray two ends of a single scale. However, after getting their feedback, and dealing with their confusion for a bit, and thinking about it on the ride home, I came up with an alternate way to portray the scales in a way that makes more sense, and instead of "sometimes you want to roll low, sometimes you want to roll high, and you'll slide those d4s up or down accordingly".

Original Protag sheet
http://www.kitkowski.com/lj/shock/original.pdf
"Revised" Protag sheet (of sorts, very rough)
http://www.kitkowski.com/lj/shock/revised.pdf

...crap, I've got a lot more to say (we had fun, in short, but had a couple followup questions), but I need to leave work now.  Will post the rest tonight.

-Andy

OK, back at home, but have to do a few things.  To explain the sheets above:

1) The "scale areas" are big enough that you can set dice in them to visually orient yourself as to how well you succeeded (or failed).

2) The scales start at 10 and go down. It would be effectively saying "OK, split nine points between the two sides, but each side has to have at least one. Do this for both scales. Fill in that many boxes, working from 10 and going down. Put a "Star" (or mark of some kind) in the box below your last filled square." (the star represents landing on the "exact number of the scale").

3) This way, assuming that the player is really trying to "succeed", they pick the side of the scale that they want to use, roll a number of d10s and (then most likely, if they really want to succeed) pick the highest one.

When countering the other with d4s, they choose the one they want to use and (using the new scale, they will always) lower the protag's number by that amount. If that makes them fall off the scale, they fail.

=============

Anyway, that explains what I was doing when I came up with the alternate sheet template, above.

I'll put another LJ post about how the game went in a day or two (it went really well, considering that this was the first shared-GMing experience for most of the players, and I think was in fact the first time three of the players ever actually took on a "GM" role before! Yeah, my group is a great example of the typical milquetoast "brought up on D&D, interested but not a lot of experience with indie games" play group, which I think is great; it'll really point out where more work is needed for those games that are lacking folks who are really used to these kinds of games). 

I also have a few questions, namely on minutia dice and how they adjust the results, as well as what to do when the Protag, Antag, or both hit their "Scale Number" exactly (how to escalate conflict for one "tag" when the opponent effectively just succeeded, etc). I'll frame those questions this weekend.

-Andy

Ah, yes. Reading the God Damned Praxis Scales. I've made a subtle change on the most recent one that, I think makes it easier to read.

Yours is easy to read, but really hard to explain.

Here's the deal: if you want to succeed by the scale on the left, you roll lower than the number. If you want to succeed by the one on the right, roll higher than that number.

Vincent pointed out that you could do it so that you can have two parallel numbers that total 9, and if you roll over by 1, you escalate the situation. The question there is whether that says, "The two represent a choice".

Andy, I doubt you'll want to integrate this rule so late in the game, but maybe:

Assume that anything longer than a short story is, in fact, made up of a bunch of short stories. So do a series of stories with smallish Story Goals and around 27 Credits, which should be good for three or so sessions. Determining the direction of the story from there should be much more dynamic. Plus, it keeps the scale of conflict interesting.

(Edited because it's 27, not 17.)