Hi everyone,

After many failed attempts to talk myself out of it, I have decided to take the first tentative steps towards designing my own game.  [Ron, if you read this, please know that this is a different project than the one I asked you about in the private email].  At this point, I am hoping to get specific feedback on only one or two things.  I will save these questions for the end.

Since I have something of a reputation for long posts, I will try to keep this as brief as I can or, failing that, at least organize this post under specific headings so that people can navigate this post more easily.

Setting and Inspiration

This is all very sketchy at this point but will no doubt take on a firmer outline soon.  The game I am hoping to create is one in which the players take on the roles of epic heroes who struggle in defense of their communities, its mores, and its gods.  In this it is very similar to HeroQuest in that the expectation is that the players will take up these roles during a time of enormous upheaval where threats to these things abound.  Although I have never played HeroQuest, I am very familiar with Glorantha and it is probably the principle source of inspiration for the game.  Sources of literary inspiration include: Gilgamesh, Homer, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Mabinogion, Sundiata, Icelandic sagas, Howard's Conan stories, Leiber's Lhankhmar stories, and Moorcock's Elric.

As I see it, the setting is one in which the world is animated and permeated by the divine realm. Although the energy that keeps the stars in their rounds seems to be slowly but perceptibly draining from the universe, the Gods still perform mighty deeds through their followers that recapitulate the great events of the God Time and thus the cosmos is regularly renewed and its fundamental rightness affirmed.  It is also a time of great passions, of emotions so extravagant that we are forced to imagine that the people of that time exceeded us as much in size as in feeling simply in order to have a vessel large enough to contain so much emotion.

All of this is admittedly very tentative, but it should give you some idea of what I am pursuing.

So What Am I After?

You might be thinking, "Okay, so why don't you just play HeroQuest?"  There are a few reasons for this.  First, I have something of a love-hate relationship with the bidding mechanics in HeroQuest.  I admire a number of things about them, but I always wind up finding them a bit flat over time.  Second, I think that while HeroQuest does a brilliant job of emulating certain aspects of epic and myth and is deservedly regarded as a very innovative game design, there is at least one way in which it is still fairly traditional in its design and, consequently, doesn't quite capture something about epic literature that I want to model.

To make clear what I am after in this game, I first want to imagine the following scenario as if it was part of a story rather than an event in a game.  From there I think it will be easier to explain what I hoping to model in the game.

Let's imagine a situation involving three people: two men (Iglac and Wulfstan) and a woman (Brenna).  Wulfstan is the thane of the Angalorings, renowned for his wise counsel, his prowess with a hand-axe, and his almost comical doting upon his wife, Brenna.  Wulfstan esteems his wife's opinion greatly, and strives to do everything he can to please her. Brenna is a beautiful, proud and somewhat disdainful thane's wife, as well-known for her sharp wit as Wulfstan is for his sharp axe.  She is a woman of fierce but somewhat unstable passions who laughs as much in real mirth as in mockery.  Iglac is a young warrior who envies Wulfstan's great fortune and who nurses a not-so-secret passion for Brenna.  He is an unseasoned youth and warrior, prone to leaping headlong into danger of all kinds, but his many indiscretions are generally regarded with good humor and as the product of youthful high-spiritedness.  However, recently he has become bolder in making his love for Brenna known, encouraged by her indulgence of his passionate overtures toward her.

Wulfstan confronts Iglac with his suspicions that Iglac and Brenna are having an affair and the confrontation rapidly escalates to violence.  Iglac reluctantly draws his sword, well aware that Wulfstan is the more skilled warrior.  Wulfstan circles with his axe, looking for the right opportunity to launch an attack and brooding on the possibility that his wife has cuckolded him with this callow youth.  Iglac stammers meekly that the many ballads he has composed for Brenna are innocent and conventional celebrations of women's beauty and wit and not intended to give Wulfstan offense.  Wulfstan moves closer to the nervous youth, noting the way Iglac's sword has dropped down and left his side exposed.  Wulfstan's muscles coil as he prepares for the axe to bite deep into Iglac's flesh when, remembering the joyful look on Brenna's face the day Iglac had presented her with his first composition, something deep inside burns and shames him and he buries the axe deep in the cold turf.

If this were part of a story, we would identify Wulfstan's recollection of Brenna as the hinge that turns this conflict away from simple revenge and towards a different, more uncertain resolution of Wulfstan's feelings.  It is this hinge that I want to try to model in this game.  In many (if not most) games, modelling this would be rather difficult and would very likely simply be a bit of color added to flesh out the description of a failed roll.  Even in HeroQuest I think that this would become simply one colorful way to describe an AP transfer from Wulfstan to Iglac.  What I want to do is to create a system that builds this kind of thing into the mechanics of the game, so that it becomes an ever-present mechanical possibility that players can avail themselves of. 

Here's how I am thinking this would work (and just to be clear, this is really, really all hypothetical).  Let's say that Wulfstan is a major NPC in the game.  He's defined by certain abilities and passions as are all characters in the game.  One of Wulfstan's passions is something like "Love for Brenna: 7" while he might have an ability like "Skilled with an Axe: 8."  [I should point out that all these numbers are completely made-up and are here simply to display differences in abilities between opponents.]  Iglac, by contrast, is a PC with an ability like "Skilled with a Sword: 4."  Because I am pretty unimaginative at this point about the specifics of the dice resolution system but also because I like them, let's imagine that the numbers represent dice pools.  It should be pretty obvious, therefore, that in a fight between Wulfstan and Iglac, Iglac is at a serious risk of losing. 

So what I have in mind is a system that would allow the player of Iglac to try to level the playing field by using one of Wulfstan's characteristics against him rather than trying to defend himself against Wulfstan's axe by using his own sword ability.  In this case (following the story example) I want the system to allow Iglac's player to use something like Wulfstan's "Love for Brenna: 7" passion as a defense against Wulfstan's "Axe: 8" ability.  The player would of course have to make a persuasive case for why the ability or passion selected is relevant to the events of play at that moment, but success would permit the player to then roll 7 dice defending against Wulfstan's 8-die attack. A success would allow him to narrate something like that last sentence in the story example.

I think that this has the possibility of creating exciting play because the players would not be restricted simply to using the things (abilities/passions) listed on their own sheets.  It would (I think) introduce some real creativity and strategizing among players as they tried to make a case for the use of particular abilities/passions.

Questions

I really like this as an idea, but I have some concerns about how it would work in actual play.  Given that players would be inclined to use this most when facing opponents who outranked them in abilities and passions, is there a danger that it might lead to overuse and a reduction in Challenge and/or Tension?

Should I think about creating a system whereby players would be limited in the number of times they could avail themselves of this option?  In other words, should I treat it as a limited Resource that players would have to manage strategically?  And if the answer to that is "Yes," does anyone have any suggestions for that?

Thanks for your thoughts,

Eric

Interesting concept. Here are some thoughts:

There should be some reward for the player when someone in using his passion, or it will be hard to get the players to make interesting passions.

You may limit the use of passions by making it risky. ex: If a player uses an NPC's passion and loose the conflict, one of the player's own passion will increase.

- Anders

Eric,

You mention using the trait as a hinge. That looks like fruitful territory; is there a way that you can design conflicts such that they can revolve around (and thus alter or control) a trait?

To answer your question,

If you're trying to build a tactically interesting system, then "using someone else's trait" has to become a decision-point. You and Anders both suggest ways to do this, by requiring expenditure of a resource or 'paying rent' to the other character for use. Is this necessarily the effect you want to create? You could alternatively reward players for interweaving other characters' traits into their actions, under the logic that this'll encourage them to do so. By rewarding the player whose trait is borrowed, you're doing the opposite thing, encouraging players to make traits that are ripe for picking.

Or you could take cost/reward out completely, if you want to treat trait-borrowing as an unremarkable matter of course.

My first thought is that you have more going on "under the hood" than your dice pool attributes cover:

1) Iglac's ability in persuasion/conning--I could not see a dullard thinking of re-characterizing his offense (writing intentionally seductive ballads to a married woman) into a compliment (the woman is only his chaste Muse).

2) The actual nature of the ballads--no amount or persuasion will make clearly pornographic or subversive lyrics into "high praise of Womanhood". Especially in the eyes of a husband.

3) Wulfstan's confidence in his relationship--he went from "this guy is sweet-talking my woman" to "she must be doing the horizontal mambo with the cur!" in a pretty fell swoop. You mentioned something about how he "dotes on" her--that seems to be part of his willingness to jump to conclusions.

Where does this all go, vis a vis your quest for a "shared character sheets" sort of mechanic? I am glad you asked!

I would approach some attributes as "positive" and some as "negative". Positive attributes can be used by a player for his character's benefit. Negative attributes can be used by other players against the character. Then, include some attribute of the character (not a hard-and-fast rule of the system) that manages how much and how often the negative can be used against someone (this would explain the 1 above). Finally, do not have direct opposition, but rather comparison of testing against a target (2 and 3 above).

Thus, the conflict becomes more dynamic:
Wulfstan isn't as sure of his relationship with Brenna as he could/should be (they have unequal "Loves Each Other" stats) and, as such, he "fails" a test of his relationship (he actually rolls higher than Brenna and, so, his beliefs about the relationship reign supreme), he Reverts To Type (another passion: "Solves Most Problems By Killing Them"). The axe is drawn.

Meanwhile, Iglac has been dancing too close to the fire--though he hasn't stuck a hot dog into it yet, right?--and so his ballads are hard to justify (2 above: some kind of target number of success in his Persuasion check [1 above], rather than two opposed passions rolling off, like with Wulfstan). So he first rolls to attempt to re-characterize the attention he has paid Brenna (static successes vs a target number). Each success gives him the "right" to draw on a die of Wulfstan's "Loves Brenna", up to the maximum of Loves Brenna.

Iglac makes his Persuasion check by, say, 4 successes... he takes 4 dice from Wulfstan's Loves Brenna, adds them to his 4 dice of Sword. they roll as equals and, apparently, Iglac rolls higher and "wins" the conflict--yet he can't win it with Sword use, because he used as many Loves Brenna dice, and they take "precedence" as he gained access to them in a non-Sword-like way. Uh... I'm losing it, here, but I hope you see my notion.

Some stat like Know Weakness or Persuasion or some other can be used to "access" another character's passion dice, but success in the use of that "access attribute" determines how many dice can be pulled. Further, pulling dice gives them "weight" that must be used to resolve the conflict--say, they get a two-to-one weighting. Thus, though the conflict is over Use of Weapons, once attributes are accessed, the way it will resolve can change.

Iglac "won the duel" by not having to fight. He had to "win" that way because there's an 8 to 4 weighting of Wulstan's passion in Iglac's favor versus Iglac's innate attributes: that passion is more of a determinant than Iglac's Sword use. So he narrates the result as "Wulfstan is persuaded that these minor fancies and poems bring his wife joy--and that it makes no sense for him to chop Iglac into Iglac Snacks out of love for his wife. He 'loses' the duel by not even raising his axe for a swing...."

(Yep, I write long posts, too!) ;-)
Howsat? I think it's a nice way to let folks hook into others' characters, constrain how much they can do so within the context of the character's schtick or abilities, and puts a check-and-balance into place where the use of another's passion limits your narrative freedom, as a winner of a conflict. After all, if Iglac wanted to kill Wulfstan--in a valid, honorable duel that Wulfstan instigates!--he couldn't use that passion to, then, say "you love your wife so much, you are staring at her eyes as I run you through!".

Hmmm.... maybe these passions and their positive counterparts, attributes, need to be somehow "tracked" or "typed" so that, say, a Love passion can't be used to Kill--and vice versa (you can't Kill enough folks to make that special someone Love you). That would help prevent perversions of the system goals--for example, if Iglac tries to twist the 8-weight of Love into a way he can end up "really" using Sword at the root (the "love blinds you to my attack" example, above). That tracking/typing will make for some fun metaphysical ponderings....

Go for this one... I like the core mechanic notion;
David

Taking a different tack, this is quite easy to do with cards, where the rules allow viewing an opponents hand, and extracting a card from an opponents hand.  Then, this scenario would play out I.'s player extracting a card from W.'s players hand and playing it.

Basically, skills, properties, whatnot incarnated on physical objects can be transeferred between people easily as a play mechanic.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to drop a quick note first to thank everyone for their very thoughtful comments and second to say that I will followup shortly with a detailed response to some of the suggestions.  Unfortunately at the moment, however, I have some pages that I need to proofread for work.  I hope to have this done early enough that I can finish my response and post it this evening.  Thanks again!

Cheers,

Eric

Hi all,

First, thanks to everyone for the responses.  I’ve been a longtime lurker and infrequent poster in this community for a long time and I never cease to be impressed by the generosity of time and attention people give to other people’s ideas.  Your responses have been very helpful to me, although I admit that they really force me to confront a lot of issues I had hoped to put off for a while longer. Oh well.

Second, I want to say that it is amazing how frequently the physical act of walking a long distance helps me to refine/revise my ideas.  So to anyone who ever finds themselves “stuck” and unsure of how to proceed with an idea, my advice is to take a brisk, long walk.

Before I respond to each of your comments, I want to stress that the example I provided shouldn't be given undue weight. I wrote it at the computer and intended it to convey the overall contours of what I am trying to achieve with the mechanic (namely, allowing one player to make use of another player's character's characteristic [in this case a Passion] in order to enable that player to produce in play something that one frequently finds in the literature--i.e. the war of passions that often rage within a character and that influence that character's actions.  That’s the vital kernel at the heart of the example that I need to crack.  The particular details—for example the stuff about Iglac stammering that his ballads to Brenna are merely conventional celebrations of beauty and so on—is all simply color that I banged out while sitting at the computer.  So I don’t want people to get hung up on trying to break down the various “tasky”—to coin a term—bits of the example at this point.  I agree that, as written, the example would seem to point in the direction of Iglac’s player having to use some sort of “Persuasion/Conning” ability, but that is a bit further down the road than I want to be at this time.  For now, I simply want to concentrate on whether there are just too many intractable problems with the idea of letting one player use another player’s characteristic (in this case a Passion) against that other character.  [Dave—if you read this, I hope you don’t take this as dismissing what you wrote in any way.  It was really, really helpful and there are lots of good ideas contained in that post that I need to process].

Okay, so on to the comments.

Anders:

I think rather than giving the player a reward when someone uses that player’s passion, the incentive for creating interesting passions will center on the fact that passions can be used to augment the player’s own abilities.  That has been my assumption all along, I just failed to state it in my first post.  So, the normal procedure will be that players will design passions that they imagine using regularly to augment their character’s abilities.  Your point about making use of another’s passions risky is a good one, and again is one way I had imagined limiting the use of passions. My proposed solution differs a bit from yours, but I will definitely think seriously about your proposal.  I’ll say a bit more about my idea later.

Shreyas:

I agree completely that using someone else’s trait has to become a decision-point, and I plan on constructing the game in such a way that it facilitates play that puts passions and drives (and the things towards which they are directed, as well as the consequences that result from their use) at the center of play.  I think your other questions might be best answered a bit later since it impinges on Anders point about how or whether to limit trait use.

David:

Wow, there is a lot to digest in that post.  I think what I said in my third paragraph (above) answers one part of your post.  At this point the only crucial part of the example is the part involving use of one character’s passion against that character by someone else.  The proposed explanation by Iglac and all the rest is just b.s. that I came up with in order to make the example interesting.  So the big (and simple) question is: is the idea of giving players the ability to use another character’s trait against them either too stupid or too mechanically nightmarish to contemplate?  I get the strong feeling that you think it is at least worth pursuing further to see where it leads.  So now on to the rest of your post.

The idea of breaking down attributes into positive and negative attributes and allowing only negative attributes to be used by another player against a character is intriguing, but I think that it might not be the best way for me to go for the following reason.  Since the idea of the game is strongly influenced by ancient epics, I want to stay faithful to what I see as a distinctive feature of that epic world, namely the fact that the positive characteristics of epic heroes, the very things that make them admirable and interesting, are also the things that frequently undo them.  So for that reason I don’t want to partition attributes into positive and negative, much as it might solve some of my mechanical problems.

The image of the hinge is really vital to the way I am conceiving how passions work.  Think, for example, of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad.  His passion for Patroklos leads him to achieve remarkable feats against the Trojans, but it also leads him to engage in dangerously impious behavior in Book 24 when he drags Hektor’s corpse behind his chariot.  One could say the same of Oedipus who, though a figure in a tragic drama, is also a figure from the world of myth.  His keen insight and his tenacity in solving riddles is what marks him as a great and admirable figure, but his determination to unravel the riddle of his own birth is his undoing.  In these and lots of other cases the same feature that marks the hero as great is also what brings him misery.  It swings like a hinge in two directions.  I want the game to model that.

I really like what you say about how the passion in question ought to limit what the player gets to narrate.  Of course, this raises a whole new set of issues (such as how exactly characters die or get injured in this game).  I have some ideas about what I want to make possible in the game, but not much yet on the mechanics of how to realize those possibilities.

There are some other really interesting ideas in your post that I haven’t yet touched on, but since this post is already long I’ll forego responding to these for now.

Thanks everyone for all your good thoughts so far.  Since it’s 1:30 AM, I think I’ll wait until morning to post some of my more recent ideas for resolving some of these issues. 

Cheers,

Eric   

The image of the hinge is really vital to the way I am conceiving how passions work.  Think, for example, of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad.  His passion for Patroklos leads him to achieve remarkable feats against the Trojans, but it also leads him to engage in dangerously impious behavior in Book 24 when he drags Hektor’s corpse behind his chariot.  One could say the same of Oedipus who, though a figure in a tragic drama, is also a figure from the world of myth.  His keen insight and his tenacity in solving riddles is what marks him as a great and admirable figure, but his determination to unravel the riddle of his own birth is his undoing.  In these and lots of other cases the same feature that marks the hero as great is also what brings him misery.  It swings like a hinge in two directions.  I want the game to model that.

Anders wrote: So you may want to have 'The Story' as an actor in the game that can use the characters passions.

I'll try to keep this one on the shorter side since I have another email in the works that addresses some of David's comments but that also fleshes out more of the specifics of the game design.  Thanks again in advance to everyone for their help.

Anders:

Sorry for the long silence, but I have been quite busy.  You are quite right that what I wrote in the followup post was not an example of an NPC using another character's Passion against him/her, but it was not intended to be.  It was meant instead as a clarification of my point about why dividing characteristics into distinct positive and negative qualities does not fit my sense of the classical world.  *That* world is one in which passions are not qua passions either positive or negative.  Achilles' passionate anger is a very positive characteristic in certain circumstances and within certain bounds, but stripped of these it is potentially ruinous to him.  So that was the only thing that particular example was intended to convey.

The inspiration for a character who plays on another character's passion in the hope of bring about a certain effect is found in Book 24 of Homer's Iliad.  You are probably familiar with the scene.  Achilles has slain Hector (Priam's last remaining son) for Hector's killing of Patroclus.  Achilles in his grief fastens Hector's body to his chariot and proceeds to drag him face down around Patroclus' tomb; however, the gods protect Hector's body against this intended impious defilement.  Priam is told by Hermes to go into Achilles camp and plead for Hector's body, urging him to appeal to Achilles' love for his own aged father.  Priam does this and, in one of the most remarkable scenes in all of classical literature, we witness the transformation it begins within Achilles.  Here's Robert Fagles' brilliant translation:  "Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire / To grieve for his own father. Taking the old man's hand /  he gently moved him back.  And overpowered by memory / both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely / for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching / before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself, / now for his father, now for Patroclus once again, / and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house."

So this is where the idea for having character's use other character's Passions against them.  I think it is clear that Priam here uses something like Achilles' "Love for family" Passion against him.  Mechanically, this would probably involve combining Priam's Persuade dice with dice taken from Achilles' "Love for family" Passion against Achilles--who in the game might be resisting with his Passion "Love for Patroclus" and some other undetermined skill/ability.

Re: whether there ought to be something like "The Story" as an actor that can use various characters' passions, I'm not sure how to respond.  Part of me thinks that this might be over complicating things since it introduces an abstraction into the mix when it might simply be easier to let the various players perform this role through decisions and actions by their characters.  I guess this gets around to one of my design goals for this game which I'll explain below.

Design Goals

The motivation behind creating mechanics that allow players (including the GM) to use specific characteristics (Passions/Drives) against the character who possesses those characteristics is twofold:

1) I wanted to give players considerable power in shaping the story being developed through play.  Since sudden changes in a character's (A) actions often come about in epic literature as a result of another character (B) appealing to some passion or drive in the first character (A), I wanted to make this a real and regular part of play and find a way to give the players the power/authority to attempt that.  On its own, this is not really all that remarkable a goal.  You can see something of this in Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon, where the GM can call on the player to roll his character's Chaste vs. Lustful characteristics in certain circumstances, for example, and the result of the roll will determine something about the direction in which the story goes.  I wanted to take this out of the GM's exclusive hands (which is where it is in Pendragon) and distribute the power among all the players.  I also wanted to avoid the duality of characteristics one finds in Pendragon in things like Chaste/Lustful because that dualism struck me as more appropriate to the Arthurian Christian milieu than to a game based on classical, pre-Christian models.

2) I also knew that I wanted to take a stab at creating a game that went some distance towards overcoming the long-standing tendency in rpgs of "the player has exclusive control over his/her character's motivations and actions."  Now there are important reasons perhaps to maintain that exclusive control--for example in order to prevent the GM from "deprotagonizing" the players--but I think that by distributing this power equally among all the game's participants you can prevent the potential problem of the players having anxieties about loss of control over their character (they gain control at the same time they agree to relinquish exclusive control over their own character's drives) and, at the same time, gain some cool possibilities for how the story is created through play.

So there is about as clear a statement as I have for *why* I want to pursue this particular goal.  I think you can probably see why I want to avoid introducing some other entity like "The Story" as the actor through which this all happens.

To wrap this up, here's how I envision it all working:

Iglac wants to persuade Wulfstan (who is hell bent on attacking Iglac for his lascivious ballads to his wife) against killing him.  Iglac's player says that Wulfstan's wife, Brenna, would never want Wulfstan to kill another man for her sake and for something as comparatively innocuous as what Iglac has done.  He is using his Persuade skill combined with Wulfstan's "Love for Brenna" Passion while Wulfstan is using his "Love for Brenna" passion and his Axe skill.  Now here's the important bit: when Iglac's player says that "Brenna would not want Wulfstan to kill for her, blah, blah, blah," he is making this up on the spot.  Nothing in prior play has established that this is how Brenna feels or that this is what she believes.  Iglac's player is proposing the introduction of a wholly new fact into play ("Brenna wouldn't want you to kill") in order to a) dodge a bullet--or in this case an axe--and b) to introduce an interesting new story possibility into this particular conflict and to see how it resolves.  Of course the dice are what will determine whether this succeeds or not, but what I want more than anything is to be able to give the participants the power to freely introduce these kinds of elements into play as a way of creating cool story possibilities.

Hope that all makes sense.  More to come about character creation, conflict, and a possible endgame mechanic.

Cheers,

Eric