So, I've figured out how I want to do my conflict resolution, and wanted to put it up to see if I have any gaping mechanical holes in things, prior to taking this to playtest mode (which ought to happen in the next few nights, depending on my players' schedules).

Note: I'm leaving out the Story Mode stuff, which you can read about in a very larval form here: http://www.story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=369&page=1#Item_6

Alright, lets pick up at the point that someone calls a Conflict.

Step 1: Setting some stakes. This works, basically, like just about every other stakes-setting game out there. Side A picks what they get if they win, side B does the same, if there is disagreement then they go back to the drawing board. Once both sides have agreed to the stakes, they then need to determine the importance of the conflict.

Step 2: There are three levels of importance to conflicts, and these distinctions serve two primary goals. Firstly, the depending on the level of the conflict, a side will need to accumulate a greater number of successes in order to achieve victory. Secondly, the number of Karma/Fate/Plot Points/Pennies/Gum Drops the characters get for participating in or winning a conflict are determined by the level.

Minor Conflicts only require one success to be gained in order to win them. The winner receives 2 Karma, the loser receives one. Most things that in other games would be (non-combat) task resolution would be a minor conflict in this game. Of course, anything can be minor as long as the participants agree to it. Knocking out Generic Russian Soldier A75 doesn't really matter much to Solid Snake's story, does it?

Significant Conflicts are generally more important to the story. The character must accumulate three successes to win, with the winner receiving 6 Karma and the loser taking home 3. Most fights, magical rituals, debates, research (for investigative type games) etc. will be Significant.

Major Conflicts should come along maybe once or twice a session. The big flashy showdown against the enemy aces in a mecha show, the big brawl with the cultists down by the bayou, the last stand against the psycho killer, the end-of-level boss fights, the Supreme Court hearing that will determine the future of this country...these would all be major conflicts. To win one of these, the character must gather five total successes. The winner receives 10 Karma, while the loser(s) take 5.

Step 3: Action! The diceplay of the game ought to be relatively simple. Players have pools of Resources (Stamina, Lore, Composure, Will) that they spend to activate their Traits, which will in turn contribute their dice rating to the player's side. Each Trait costs one point of an appropriate Resource to use, and Traits are rated on a scale of dice ranks (d4/d6/d8/d10/d12), and can only be activated once each round. A round is one opposed roll, and the winner of the role gets one success. The following round, used Traits can be employed once again. (Maybe some kind of exhaustion mechanic so that the exact same Traits don't get used in the exact same combination each Round?) This repeats until one side has gathered the needed number of successes.

Of course, that is just the mechanics side of it. The players will need to narrate their actions each round, tieing the activated Traits into their character's actions in some manner. With a maximum of nine rounds of narration for a Major conflict, I think this won't wear thin on a single conflict. Think "Shab Al-Hiri Roach" with potentially several rounds to a single conflict.

Step 4: Conseqiences. The participants all take their share of the Karma. Then, the winner is required by the rules to spend at least half of this won Karma bringing the stakes into play. This is a simple matter of spending a certain number of these points to modify the Style Sheets (sort of like combination Lore Sheets (or at least my interpretation thereof based on second hand information) and traditional character sheets, that contain the setting and situation of the game as created by the players and GM.) This could mean adding Traits, raising or lowering them, whatever. Once this is done, the conflict resolution system turns off, and the story mode system turns back on.

So, what do I want to know? Well, three things...

1) There are lots and lots (and lots) of games which play with conflict resolution rules. Which, if any, does this strike anyone as similar to, and why? Is the game in question a good thing to be similar to, or not?

2) Resource management powers the conflict system. Characters cannot just "do things" when folks call a conflict, they must burn Resources. Given that these Resources are refueled by the story mode (which, to sum up, rewards characters Resource points for narrating in elements of the game world), does this model hold any appeal to the conflict resolution crowd?

3) There are five ranks to any element. Presently I have these divided up die size. Given that 2-3 elements on each side rated from 1 to 5 should be average for a single round, would using d6 dicepools or cards either require too many fiddly bits (said dice and cards) or affect the feel of the system in a negative way? I ask because if I determine this not to be the case, I will include variant rules suggestions that will allow folks to use said dicepools or cards.

Hopefully that is enough to create some useful feedback. If you have any questions, ask and I'll get an answer for you.

Thanks for your time,
Eric

Well, I have a question (taken from p19):

How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

I am asking this because I can not see how this resolution system really support your game.

I will repeat some of what I said in your last Mythos thread: What I find most fascinating in your game is that the characters will question their perception of reality, and because of this, either go mad or find enlightenment. This is what I really want to see as a basis for your resolution system.

And if you base your system on this it will be unique for your game, and then you don't have to be concerned about it being to similar to other games'.

- Anders

And if you base your system on this it will be unique for your game, and then you don't have to be concerned about it being to similar to other games'.

Eric wrote:
1) There are lots and lots (and lots) of games which play with conflict resolution rules. Which, if any, does this strike anyone as similar to, and why? Is the game in question a good thing to be similar to, or not?

2) Resource management powers the conflict system. Characters cannot just "do things" when folks call a conflict, they must burn Resources. Given that these Resources are refueled by the story mode (which, to sum up, rewards characters Resource points for narrating in elements of the game world), does this model hold any appeal to the conflict resolution crowd?

3) There are five ranks to any element. Presently I have these divided up die size. Given that 2-3 elements on each side rated from 1 to 5 should be average for a single round, would using d6 dicepools or cards either require too many fiddly bits (said dice and cards) or affect the feel of the system in a negative way? I ask because if I determine this not to be the case, I will include variant rules suggestions that will allow folks to use said dicepools or cards.

Mythos is a game about three things.

1) Building a Mythos of the players' own.

2) Exploring that Mythos.

3) Exploring the response by those characters to that Mythos.

I'm just heading out to eat now, so I'll more thorough replies when I get back but...

1) Regarding HeroQuest: I keep hearing good things about this, and it is one of the few games which gets frequently talked about here that is actually stocked by my local gaming store folks. I'll head down tonight or tomorrow to skim over it and see what I can see.

2) Regarding effectiveness being connected to developing the Mythos: Yes, that is fairly strongly what I am after, when I think about it. The "push" of the game at this point is focus on building and then living in a setting of the players own creation. Mechanically rewarding that is something that I feel is a positive quality, though I will be including a "safety valve" for those players who may not be the best at unpacking. I'm not sure how I want to do this yet, but that is what playtesting is for, right? Off the top of my head, perhaps I could reward players for doing interesting things with those elements already in play? This would probably be a Fan Mail type thing where the other players go "cool" and award points. I definitely have this flagged already as something to work on.

3) Regarding my Introduction to the Mythos draft on my website: Yeah, that is true. The current Style Sheet thing came about from my work for the mythos building subsystem in the original draft. It got to something a bit before this point, at which time I asked myself if I should just unify character and situation building into one unit. Things are still moving around and being toyed with at the moment. Don't worry about my setting just winding up as color. ^_~ Either the Style Sheets will be sucked back into it, or I will install something else in it. I am still very jazzed about that setting and the questions you can ask with it, I'm just trying to find a good way to do it.

4) As for my setting and mechanics being somewhat divorced: At the moment, this is rather true. I am not entirely opposed to this, but I know the concern you are expressing. If it turns out that I cannot tighten things back up after getting Style Sheets worked out, I'll spin this off as something else and go back to percentiles and all the clattering  joy they represent for Mythos itself, and make it do what I want some other way.

4b) Regarding Battle and Conflict Mode...that is just me not proofreading myself. When I first conceived of the idea for the split my head was in console game-land, so it got tagged Battle. Conflict mode is the working term for it, since it is for more than just "battles." I'll proofread more carefully in the future.

I'll hit the rest of Danny_K's questions when I get back. They are excellent points, and deserve some more robust answers than I can give at this point.

Soups n' Sandwiches n' Sorcery, oh my!
Eric

2) How will the system handle a character who is min/maxed -- their whole concept and development is focused on developing a small number of widely usable Traits and enough Resources to power them? 

3) I notice that you have three different levels of conflict, which differ only in the number of successes needed and in the amount of payoff.  I also get the impression that the level of conflict is up to the GM to decide.  Since the mechanics are all exactly the same in each case, the only real difference is that a higher-level conflict will cost more resources to resolve, with a greater payoff at the end that may or may not outweigh the resources invested in the conflict.  I wonder if there's a way to make just one kind of conflict, and let it get bigger or smaller depending on how important it is to the players? 

4) Whatever size conflict, the loser gets X Karma points, the winner gets X Karma points to keep and X Karma points he has to spend immediately on his Loresheet.  Right?  It seems to me that, in any conflict, the best approach is to fold immediately if it seems like you're going to lose.  Conversely, if it seems like you're going to lose and this is a very important conflict for you, is there a way to risk more in order to win? 

Eric wrote:

• I think you crazy Forge folk call it the "Social Contract". You wouldn't pull something like that in a game of PTA, would you? There should be an understanding that the goal of play at the table is to tell interesting stories to each other. Mechanically, I think this is a fine argument for a Karma-as-Fan-Mail system, and socially players should be more mature than that. Why not do something more about it? Because I feel that the more rules you add to stop munchkinism the more headaches you cause those players and groups that have moved beyond that.
• Lastly, simple boredom. Setting oneself up to win conflicts like that left and right is a good way to run out of interesting things to spend Karma on.

OK, I think this is a big red flag.  Both of these statements suggest that there's a known flaw in the rules, and that you're outsourcing responsibility for fixing that flaw to the players. What happens if one of the players really, really likes what he's coming up with and so uses the rules, perfectly legally, to run roughshod over the other players?  I can see myself doing that in the heat of the moment - I like my own cooking. If the system has no way to handle this other than saying "Man don't be a twink", that's a problem.

someone else

Wow...so I just dug through a couple of reviews of Dogs to put together a rough sketch of the resolution mechanic, looking for what Danny was talking about. And the raise/see etc thing just sold me on what I am using for my randomizers. It is definitely going to be cards. I'll change the conflict bit around to base Min/Sig/Major successes off individual "rounds" within the overall conflict. I think this will be both more natural and place the escalation in the hand's of the players.

I am doing the first playtest tonight around 8 o' clock, so we'll see how this plays out, but what I am guessing is that doing this way will emphasize the tactical side of the Conflict system that I enjoyed (and that sparked me off on this path in the first place), remove the arbitrary nature of my Conflict levels and slow down the accrual of Karma a touch, and further one of my other big goals: accessibility. I'll post more on this when I get tonight's AP in.

Also, my rules fit on three pages. ^.^ I am quite woot at this point. I'll process this into a playtest level document after tonight's game.

For great justice,
Eric Bennett