You know the story:  Boy meets girl.  Boy loves girl.  Girl loves boy.

Monday:  Boy tries to tell girl he loves her ... but earlier that day girl heard a spiteful (and untrue) rumor that Boy was going to try to trick her into admitting love for him in order to win a bet.  Girl rejects boy before he can even say anything.

Tuesday:  Girl has learned the truth.  Girl regrets monday.  Girl tries to tell boy she loves him ... but boy, still smarting from monday, rejects girl before she can even say anything.

Wednesday:  Boy learns what happened on monday and tells girl he loves her.  By now, girl has given up on boy and is going out with someone else.  Girl is tempted, but isn't going to break up with the nice guy who took her in when she was heartbroken.  Girl rejects boy.

Thursday:  Nice guy is so nice that he refuses to keep going out with girl, so she can follow her heart.  Girl goes to admit her love to boy, but he's fled to Paris to escape his pain.

... and so on.  Serial romances have long strings of really bad timing.  The genre is built on showing how people keep pursuing love even when it's not easy.  If Boy and Girl got together on Monday, and then had pleasant dates tuesday, wednesday and thursday we wouldn't feel that they really loved each other.  Not the way we do when they keep on messing up and trying again.

I've run a lot of Teenagers From Outer Space.  I'm convinced that you cannot keep two lovers apart by external means without it becoming ridiculous.  They really will climb any mountain and swim any sea ... the obstacles you need to create, if they won't cooperate, become farcical.

So what I'd like to figure out is how to get the players to cooperate.  How can a game make them really, really, really want to resolve things happily, but choose instead to defer that desire and to complicate matters yet again?

Does there need to be a second goal that the players are pursuing (e.g. "Save the world from theological alien threat?") so that the reward for deferring love can be the power to pursue that second goal?  Or is it possible to reward people for deferral in a way that feeds back into the very drives they just deferred?  Or can you actively promote that teeter-totter balance where Girl can only get the courage to reveal her feelings because Boy has lost the ability to accept that admission?

Hi Tony,

I think the first option is the one I find most intriguing. You have rules to make them want a relationship. (Not sure how but my reading makes me think you have ideas for this end.) Then you make completing that relationship have a cost they aren't likely to pay. Perhaps Love is finite, and you have to give up Love to create it with someone else? For instance, in Firefly, If Mal and Inara finally establish a romantic relationship then a crew member will have to die.

Some random ideas.

1) (This applies not only to romance, but any kind of subplot) Give small but periodic awards for failure, and big one-shot awards for success. For example, each failure earns the losing lover 1 M&M. If the lovers get together, they earn 3 M&M each, but will no longer earn any M&Ms for their romantic subplot (because it is over, basically).

2) As above, except skew final award to encourage the teeter-tooter. For example, the lover who "admits" her love gets 4 M&M if they get together and the lover who "receives" the admission gets 2 M&M. This gives the receiver an incentive to reject the admitter, because he could later get a chance to be the admitter and get the bigger reward.

I do think you need more going on that just the romance, though. I believe linear narrativists structures don't work in a game unless they are (a) resolved randomly or (b) mixed in with other activities which utilize the same game resources (following the above example, M&Ms).

In light of (a), here is a third idea.

3) Use some random mechanism (say, a dice roll), but the lovers can only get together if they roll the exact same result. If they roll differently, the high-roller must concoct some reason to reject the low roller.

Tony --

To do this, you need to have a specific, useful type of reward that you can *only* get from actively pursuing, and failing, a shared goal.

yrs--
--Ben

Paul wrote:
2) As above, except skew final award to encourage the teeter-tooter. For example, the lover who "admits" her love gets 4 M&M if they get together and the lover who "receives" the admission gets 2 M&M. This gives the receiver an incentive to reject the admitter, because he could later get a chance to be the admitter and get the bigger reward.

Seems to me, Tony, that all of those 'bad timing' incidents are actually cases of conflicts of interest.

On Monday, the girl's Status is conflicting with her Love, so she shuts the boy down.

On Tuesday, the boy's Hurt Pride is conflicting with his Love, so he shuts her down.

On Wednesday, the girl's Need is conflicting with her Love, so she shuts him down.

On Thursday, the boy's... well his Hurt Pride again is conflicting with his Love, so he's out of the country.

Doesn't Misery Bubblegum have multiple things that people care about?  Do they conflict with each other in such a way?

They certainly can, but I think it's important to give people some reason to bring them into opposition.

Oh, you don't have that yet?  Well, do it, already! ;)

Yeah.  There should be some sort of reward for that kind of bad timing!  But how do you reward it?

So, Prisoner's Dilemma ... I've been thinking about it.  The Prisoner's Dilemma is fairly well examined in a competitive setting ... but I do believe that Misery Bubblegum is going to have powerful elements of cooperation.  So I've been thinking "What does a cooperative Prisoner's Dilemma look like?"  Here's my thinking:

Alice and Ben each have a choice to Resolve or Defer.

Alice Resolves, Ben Resolves:  Alice and Ben both lose 1 point.
Alice Resolves, Ben Defers:  Alice receives 5 points, Ben loses 2 points.
Alice Defers, Ben Resolves:  Alice loses 2 points, Ben receives 5 points.
Alice Defers, Ben Defers:  Alice and Ben both receive 1 point.

If Ben chooses Defer then he has, across the board, created a better result for Alice than if he chose Resolve.  If he gets "screwed" (on a personal level) by her choosing to Resolve then the total between the two of them is the highest possible in the game, so that's actually a good thing for the two-as-unit.

And ... my mind is still balking a little at analyzing this properly.  It looks to me like people would be well served by a strategy of subtle (or not so subtle) cues to each other so that first Alice could resolve and Ben defer, then next time through Ben could resolve and Alice defer.  Those two moves net them each a +3 total.  Does that analysis look sound, as far as it goes?

I'm not sure this should get an explicit mechanic.  If you could jigger things so that this sort of situation arises organically out of the rest of the design, you'd be golden.

How does two character's star-crossed love look like in the rest of the game, and what would constitute 'resolving' their love problems?  What already exists to frustrate that happening?  What can be bumped up a little to encourage that frustration?

My thoughts on this have gone down a different track entirely. 

I'm thinking more along the lines of a "let it ride" or "press your luck" kind of deal.  i.e. the longer it goes unresolved the bigger the payout in the end, but the bigger risk of going bust.

You could do it with a sort of Doubling Cube mechanic. 

1) Doubling Cube is owned by neither.  Either can take and hope to resolve for 1 point. 
2) Girl takes Cube and offers to resolve.  If accepted each gets 1 point.
3) Boy rejects and takes Cube.  Boy can later offer to resolve which, if accepted, gets each 2 points.
4) Girl rejects and takes Cube.  Girl can later offer to resolve which, if accepted, gets each 4 points.
5) Boy rejects and takes Cube.  Boy can later offer to resolve which, if accepted, gets each 8 points.
etc.

Here I'm thinking "the Cube" would not be an actual artifact that would get passed around.  Rather in practice you'd probably just track each outstanding issue with tic marks representing the number of times its failed to resolve. 

By failed to resolve I'm thinking mechanically could have resolved (i.e. the roll succeeded or whatever) but one or the other player vetoed the successful result hoping for a bigger payout later.

Of course, to work there'd have to be some chance of the eventual payout never being realized.

TonyLB wrote:
Yeah.  There should be some sort of reward for that kind of bad timing!  But how do you reward it?

So, Prisoner's Dilemma ... I've been thinking about it.  The Prisoner's Dilemma is fairly well examined in a competitive setting ... but I do believe that Misery Bubblegum is going to have powerful elements of cooperation.  So I've been thinking "What does a cooperative Prisoner's Dilemma look like?"  Here's my thinking:

Alice and Ben each have a choice to Resolve or Defer.

Alice Resolves, Ben Resolves:  Alice and Ben both lose 1 point.
Alice Resolves, Ben Defers:  Alice receives 5 points, Ben loses 2 points.
Alice Defers, Ben Resolves:  Alice loses 2 points, Ben receives 5 points.
Alice Defers, Ben Defers:  Alice and Ben both receive 1 point.

If Ben chooses Defer then he has, across the board, created a better result for Alice than if he chose Resolve.  If he gets "screwed" (on a personal level) by her choosing to Resolve then the total between the two of them is the highest possible in the game, so that's actually a good thing for the two-as-unit.

And ... my mind is still balking a little at analyzing this properly.  It looks to me like people would be well served by a strategy of subtle (or not so subtle) cues to each other so that first Alice could resolve and Ben defer, then next time through Ben could resolve and Alice defer.  Those two moves net them each a +3 total.  Does that analysis look sound, as far as it goes?

Thunder_God wrote:
This is exactly what you asked for in your posts, and now you're refusing it. Rethink?

TonyLB wrote:

Thunder_God wrote:
This is exactly what you asked for in your posts, and now you're refusing it. Rethink?

What?  Wait a second ... what am I refusing?  I'm unclear.

You've misread me.  I agree with everything you're saying.  My intuition is that this is a strong solution to the problem, and I am very excited about that.  I'm trying to analyze it more thoroughly, to see whether my intuition is correct.

Ok, I understand :)

I still stand by my suggestion to switch into Both Defer>Both Lose 1, Both Resolve> Both Gain X, End(?).

Well, you and Ralph both bring up the issue of resolving ... and I think that part of why my mind is having trouble grappling with this issue is that while such plots certainly do resolve in the sense that a climax is reached and dramatic tension is released, I don't think that they resolve in the sense that the exact same question will never be raised again.

The question "Does he love me?" becomes "Does he still love me?" and can keep coming back no matter how many times it is "resolved."  So I want to be clear that we're talking about "resolved for now," not "resolved forever."  Which, I think, feeds back into both of your points.

Ralph, I very much like the idea of the doubling cube (though I'm not sure an exponential curve is the right way to do it).  They defer because they get a better reward (if they get the reward) later.  It fits very well with the classic explanation of why people go through such hardships:  because it makes their eventual victory so much sweeter.  In this case you're explicitly paralleling that.

And Guy, you're right that the Resolution should be something that is valuable enough to be sought after, and that the downside of it is that when you get it you can't keep seeking.  Otherwise people are going to defer forever.  I get what you're saying about switching the double-defer and double-resolve values, and I think you're right.

So here's my addition to make your two points work together:  The players should have to invest some resources into raising the conflict in the first place.  Yes, it's widely accepted that "Does he love her?" has been a conflict several times, and that it probably will be in the future, but if you want it to be an open conflict today then you have to pay for that privilege.

Players invest those resources in hopes of getting back (a) a long cycle of resolve/defer pairings that profit them and (b) a big pay-off at the end for resolving a goal that has been 'ripened' (or whatever) by all that dramatic tension.

They risk losing those resources if the conflict is resolved too early (giving them a payoff that doesn't compensate for the initial investment) or if the conflict is resolved in failure (giving them no final payoff) or, worst of all, both.

I'm not quite sure where the "resolved in failure" outcome so necessary to drive this dynamic comes from.  The two obvious choices are to pin it either on a selfless GM (traditional) or competing players (my personal thing).  There may be something better though, that I just haven't thought of.