Some people already put traits on their character sheet that are goals.  "I want to kill my brother, Gold."  "I want to become a shaman."  "I want to rule the world."

What happens to those traits when they are achieved?  Do they become worthless?

It's my contention that they should not.

Since we won't be spending HP to increase traits in my game (see http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19969.0 )  goal traits could be used and increased a lot by play.

In Nine Worlds, when a "Muse" (goal trait) is resolved (that is, either declared unachievable, or achieved) the character gets some points for it, that he can use to build up his character or win conflicts, much like HP.

Here's the proposed house rule:

When a conflict is resolved, a player can declare that a goal trait used as an augment in the conflict has been resolved.  It doesn't matter whether the goal was actually achieved or not.  The goal trait can immediately be turned in for another trait of equal level.  This can be a new goal, or a trait that represents the fruits of achieving the goal, or something totallyl extraneous.

For example: A player has the trait, "Rescue my sister from the plague-ridden city of Horemshar."  In the course of several adventures and many separate conflicts, it gets raised to a value of 5W.  Then, the sister dies of the plague.  The player declares the trait resolved, and takes a new goal: "Get revenge on Ybaldo, who prevented me from saving my sister's life 5W"

Later, after hounding Ybaldo for a while, the revenge trait has been raised to 15W, and Ybaldo is finally killed in a messy, painful way, and the player decides that his character finally feels vindicated, and the goal is resolved.  He takes the personality trait "Knows that revenge is empty 15W" and starts working on other goals he picked up along the way.

Sweet. I like the idea a lot. In your example, the goals are thematically linked:

      "Rescue my sister from the plague-ridden city of Horemshar."
      "Get revenge on Ybaldo, who prevented me from saving my sister's life 5W"
      "Knows that revenge is empty 15W"

It’s this that makes me wonder:

This can be a new goal, or a trait that represents the fruits of achieving the goal, or something totally extraneous.

I have a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards character development.  If a player says that resolving the goal "Become Queen of Terre d'Ange 15W2" should result in the attribute "Hole in my head 15W2" then who am i to argue?

I might ask them to narrate it, for entertainment value...

It's already by the book to allow the nature of relationships to change (though there's some question as to what the intended lattitude is there). It's not a huge extension to see goals as a sort of relationship (with oneself or the world in some cases), and not much further a stretch to say that these abilities can morph into other sorts of abilities.

Generally I think it's a good idea.

The big question I can think of is...does this apply to any ability you want to aim it at, or is there some limit on how many abilities are covered by this? Is there a way to start up a goal that doesn't require ending another? What if I transform all of my goal abilities into non-goals...no more play like this for me?

Mike

Currently there are some abilities that are only available when the PC has access to certain sources of knowledge.  If you aren't studying with a wizard, you can't get Assemble Crystal Apparatus.  This applies here too.

There is a way to start up a new goal without ending another; you simply take it as a new trait when you win or lose a conflict.

Let's say Lukirawa loses the conflict where the stakes are "Prevent the mortals from stealing the crystal pylon."  He could immediately take the trait, "Recover the crystal pylon (goal) 17" and get +2 on any conflicts where he's working on that goal.

So you can have as many goals as you like, right? See, one of two problems occurs, then. Either players try to wedge every new ability into some goal statement (Strong becomes "Push harder" or something). Or you're basically saying that any ability can be changed to any other when appropriate.

The latter works, actually. In fact you can just make switching the name of an ability one of the options that one selects from the list.

If you want to keep it limited, however, and give people a reason to have non-goal abilities, then you could simply cap it at three abilities at most at a time, or something. Otherwise I can see characters becoming tottering piles of goal statements.

Mike

Nine Worlds had a limit of nine muses total.  Noone ever got past five in the game we played.

If you limit goal statements to things  that can concievably be achieved, then I don't think you're right, but as anywhere else, eventually the "Don't be a dick" rule applies.

Vaxalon wrote:
Some people already put traits on their character sheet that are goals.  "I want to kill my brother, Gold."  "I want to become a shaman."  "I want to rule the world."

What happens to those traits when they are achieved?  Do they become worthless?

It's my contention that they should not.

The rule about dicks in question is at the social level. It says that one should not abuse the rules, etc. I'm personally of the belief, however, that it's not a closure for actual rules loopholes. That is, if you put a loophole in the game, and I exploit it, I'm not a dick, I'm actually playing by the rules as presented.

"Yeah, the rules don't really limit you, but you should just find a limit anyhow" is, to me, the height of negligent design.

That said, it's very simple to create limits. If you don't like a hard limit on numbers, then a very simple rule is just to say that the narrator gets to veto any such idea he doesn't like. I don't prefer that method myself, because I don't like to have to make any such judgments when they come up if I'm narrator, but it is effective.

And since, in this practical case, you are the narrator, if you don't mind it then we're fine.

"But the GM always has the right to say no" is not correct, if you're tempted to say that this is what you meant all along. That's a RPG tradition, but narrow construction of rules says that any power not expressly given is not had. There's more than one way to skin this cat, and if the answer is that it's GM fiat, then that should be made clear.

It could even be "all players agree" or "the player chooses whatever he likes" and we hope that it doesn't get out of hand. Lots of choices, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. But the purpose of RPG systems is to determine who has authority when.

Mike

I disagree that any rule that is left to the social level is negligent design.  You can't make a rule for everything!  The "Don't be a dick" rule is ALWAYS in force.  At ANY point, even when a player is acting fully within the rules, another participant can say, "Dude... don't be a dick."  The game designer HAS to leave BROAD swathes of play to the social level, because to attempt otherwise leads to Waiting/Tea or KKKKK.... or Clue.

The "don't be a dick" rule essentially devolves to the following explicit rule:

"Any participant may veto the action of any other participant.  If they cannot come to a compromise, then the participant making the veto must either leave the game or withdraw his veto."

I would argue that this rule is ALWAYS in force, whether it's in the rule text or not, and to leave it out is not negligent design.

But that's all really beside the point.

I think the best limit on goal attributes is to make them things which can concievably be achieved.  "Push harder" isn't a goal.  It's ... kind of a statement of style.

You're entirely missing my point Fred. Of course the basic social contract is always in play. It's simply that conflicts of opinion can occur when neither party is being a dick. For instance:

I think the best limit on goal attributes is to make them things which can concievably be achieved.  "Push harder" isn't a goal.  It's ... kind of a statement of style.

As a narrator, I almost never say, "That's not a goal."

Too dead-endy.  One or the other of us has to be wrong.

I'm much more likely to say:

"Hm, that doesn't sound much like a goal.  Can you describe how that would be achieved?"
or
"Hm, that doesn't sound much like a goal.  How about 'Prove that I'm stronger than <character>'?"
or
"Isn't that more like a personality trait?"

A player who's completely and totally unwilling to compromise in every situation... I probably shouldn't be gaming with him.

Hi,
Just trying to intervene and pull this interesting discussion back on track.

Mike is not trying to judge your style of play

Vaxalon wrote:
As a narrator, I almost never say, "That's not a goal."

Ah, I see what you mean, Jamie.

Evaluating whether or not a particular instance of play follows the rules isn't usually something that RPG rules cover.  Generally, it's assumed to be a role given over to the gamemaster.

In Dungeons and Dragons, if you have a +3 to hit, and you're trying to hit an armor class of 14, and you roll a seven and say, "Ten, I hit!" whose responsibility is it to tell you that no, you didn't?  The rules don't really tell you.

Are you saying that for this rule, I need to not only list the rule, but also its method of enforcement?

Sorry I know nothing about D&D

It might help if you explained how Nine Worlds defined a "Muse", and what limitations there are.

Okay, Nine Worlds has a pretty simple system.  When you are in a conflict, you draw cards from your deck equal to the power you are wielding, plus the values of any muses you are pursuing. The more cards you draw, the more likely you are to succeed.

Muses must be things that are demonstrably achievable, and involve people, places, or things in the gameworld.
"Become the Champion of Apollo"
"Kill Doctor Lucky"
"Get the brain from Zombie Five"

When you achieve the muse, you cash it in for points you can use to boost your stats.

You can only have a maximum of nine muses, and they can have a maximum value of nine.  in practice, people regularly ran into the point ceiling but never had anywhere close to nine muses at a time.

In Dungeons and Dragons, if you have a +3 to hit, and you're trying to hit an armor class of 14, and you roll a seven and say, "Ten, I hit!" whose responsibility is it to tell you that no, you didn't?  The rules don't really tell you.

Web_Weaver wrote:
Sorry I know nothing about D&D

Vaxalon wrote:
I disagree that any rule that is left to the social level is negligent design.  You can't make a rule for everything!  The "Don't be a dick" rule is ALWAYS in force.  At ANY point, even when a player is acting fully within the rules, another participant can say, "Dude... don't be a dick."  The game designer HAS to leave BROAD swathes of play to the social level, because to attempt otherwise leads to Waiting/Tea or KKKKK.... or Clue.

Vaxalon wrote:
Okay, Nine Worlds has a pretty simple system.  When you are in a conflict, you draw cards from your deck equal to the power you are wielding, plus the values of any muses you are pursuing. The more cards you draw, the more likely you are to succeed.

Muses must be things that are demonstrably achievable, and involve people, places, or things in the gameworld.
"Become the Champion of Apollo"
"Kill Doctor Lucky"
"Get the brain from Zombie Five"

When you achieve the muse, you cash it in for points you can use to boost your stats.

You can only have a maximum of nine muses, and they can have a maximum value of nine.  in practice, people regularly ran into the point ceiling but never had anywhere close to nine muses at a time.

Tim wrote:
I think it depends in part on the intended audience.  A commercial RPG that deals with a potential problem by saying "A good GM will not let this happen" or "An experienced GM will be able to deal with players who try this..." is ignoring the fact that the purchaser may be new to RPG's and not have the knowledge/confidence to be able to handle players who are acting within the letter, if not the spirit of the game....

Revisiting the potential problem with vague goals, there is little incentive to resolve them.

e.g. a player with "Be the Best" as a goal has no predefined end point to that part of his story. While that is good in terms of open ended usage and adaptability, the player may be reluctant to let go of the increasing skill and play a game of 'find the pea' with the GM over defining its resolution.

Have you observed this in play, or is there a warning against this in the game text?

The rule as quoted gets around this problem by being specific and also by being changeable, so I would see little reason to allow vague goals. The Nine Worlds playtesters may have encountered this in playtesting and decided on how specific they should be.

Of course, with co-operation the problem is lessened, but without a specific clause that defines who gets to decide when goals are achieved the potential is there for dysfunctional behaviour on either side.

Web_Weaver wrote:
Is this the primary system of development and reward in Nine Worlds? Are you suggesting that this could be adapted as the primary system in HQ?
...
I am guessing that the Nine Worlds character sheet has less things on it than HQ, is this correct?

Web_Weaver wrote:

e.g. a player with "Be the Best" as a goal has no predefined end point to that part of his story. While that is good in terms of open ended usage and adaptability, the player may be reluctant to let go of the increasing skill and play a game of 'find the pea' with the GM over defining its resolution.

Have you observed this in play, or is there a warning against this in the game text?

The rule as quoted gets around this problem by being specific and also by being changeable, so I would see little reason to allow vague goals. The Nine Worlds playtesters may have encountered this in playtesting and decided on how specific they should be.

Of course, with co-operation the problem is lessened, but without a specific clause that defines who gets to decide when goals are achieved the potential is there for dysfunctional behaviour on either side.

Cool, I think this resolves Mike's concerns earlier, (although I can't speak for him obviously). By discussing what the resloved goal would look like you are loosely predefining it, and so it should be easy to recognise and agree on when it occurs.

I find this idea very interesting so please remain patient with my questioning.

The other issue that comes to mind is the change of emphasis in the mechanics. You are importing a mechanic that is entwined with the resolution system in its origional context, and to some extent this would either replace the current augmentation system or dovetail with it.

I suppose you could just treat it like any other augment, but it would appear that Nine Worlds holds the idea far more centrally than this. So my questions are:

Do you envisage this goal based mechanic as a fundamental shift in emphasis from standard HQ, or just another tool in the box?

Would standard augmentation be de-emphasised to make room?

Essentially, you would be changing the nature of HQ toward one of character progression through goal resolution, this could act as a motivation towards a more narrativist style, but how centally would it need to be placed to have the desired effect? i.e. Could it be ignored if just shoehorned in?

I see it as another tool in the box.  It would not replace the existing system.

Goal abilities would be no different than any other, and would have to be bought alongside skills and personality traits and the rest, so I don't think it's very much of a shift.

To be honest, the only thing that really changes is the trade-in.  After all, you can already have a personality trait that says, "Wants to become King of Galatea" and get the augment whenever he's working in that direction, right?

Absolutely, I see your point and its valid, I am actually tending towards a more extreme position. If you are going to focus on goals why not go the whole way and bring it into the heart of the system, just as it appears to be in Nine Worlds.

My main thrust here is to promote the narrativist agenda in HQ, so if that is not your explicit aim then your proposition is fine as it stands.

If you just introduce it as an extra tool it becomes a single aspect of the game, and only a subtle change to the current rules. The text already suggests HP be given for achieving goals, your method would just act as a way of using the goals as active or augmenting skills in the mean time.

Currently the character advancement system has very little in it to aid a narrativist agenda, apart from blandly flagging to the GM what skills are important to you. Changing the focus towards resolution of goals forces a profound change upon everyone round the table. Games then, have to be focused upon getting to loosely defined end-points for characters to advance. The players would demand resolution and actively seek out those situations and the GM would have better flags to latch onto. Goals could act as a temporary storage tank for all HP gained until the goals are achieved, and only then be used to increase other stats.

My only concern is that it may push out of joint the augmentation mechanic, but, at present, if the group is commited to a narrativist creative agenda then augmentation merely provides an opportunity for character colour.

It would even be possible to do away with HP pools, and just reduce goals by one point when you require a change in resolution. In this way it would emphasise that forcing a change in fortune is actually contrary to achieving wider goals. It is a focus on "now" not the future.

Yeah, I'm fairly happy with the way HQ works, so I don't want to make major changes.  This is an incremental change that may lead to more drastic changes in the future.

At the risk of belaboring a tangent, I should clarify my position.

In the case of the D&D rule, there is very little ambiguity. So it's not likely to be a problem. But, that said, there are two enforcement rules in play in D&D. First, as this is a rule if any player sees it being broken, he can complain about it. That is, for things as concrete as a die mechanic, every player becomes a judge as to whether the rules are being followed. And every player will step forward at times to correct mistakes.

But, let's say that the player in question maintained that he was correct for some bizarre reason. There is a step that's taken before you "dickhead" the player out of the game. The D&D rules, in most editions at least, say that the DM is the final arbiter of all rules clarifications. It's not just tradition, the text says so in most cases.

So, yes, even in the case of the modifier in question, there is an "enforcement rule" that exists.

But the important thing here is that, while you have narrowed the criteria down somewhat, in having the goal statements have an infinite number of permutations, there must be some grey area. No matter how you slice it, you'll never get such an open-ended idea down to the point where there can never be a case that's borderline. You might be able to get it to the point where you can probably ignore the case, and get away with it.

But why?

Saying that the Narrator is the final arbiter on this is simply not as big a deal as you're making it out to be. If the definition is as clear as you say it is, the Narrator will probably not have to use the power often or at all. Further, being last arbiter does not mean that you can't negotiate first. In your example above, you can still do that while being final arbiter of things...you see me do it every time we play.

The final arbiter power comes into play when there are irreconcilable differences of opinion. I think it's a goal by the definition, you think it's not. We can't continue to play until the decision is made. All making the narrator final arbiter here does is to ensure that, if it ever gets to that point, and hopefully it never will, that the narrator gets to decide if he can have the goal or not.

Note, again, again, again, I personally dislike being in this position as well, and seek to find ways to make the criteria "hard" so that we don't ever need to go to a final arbiter - basically where saying "no" could be done by any player and is seen as just enforcing a clear rule,and not making a judgement. This is why I'd prefer something like a set limit on the number of goals. Such a limit is exactly the sort of thing that's not open to subjectivity at all.

The HQ text does have some vague "final arbiter" type clauses, and actually you could probably invoke them here. But generally I think HQ does a good job of avoiding these, and instead delineating responsibilities directly (Narrator selects improv mods, for instance). So I prefer the individiual rules to have a clause that's direct about it. Otherwise you open the door to final arbiter power getting expanded into things like "I can choose to ignore the rules if I want" and such (but that's another topic).

Anyhow, again, this is a tangent that probably belongs more in a design or theory forum. The general rule is a good one, and, as written now, will probably require little enforcement. I assume that you're thinking of this rule in conjunction with the "character advancement" rules you're currently using, right Fred? Not with the original system?

Mike

Yes, I'm planning on using both.

I'll post a completed rule on the game site.

http://www.thesmerf.com/vaxalon/RegainTheStars.html#Goals

Here's the rule text:

Goals are very important traits for heroes. They are what drive him to action. They are a specific form of personality trait, that can be used as an augment any time he is acting in furtherance of that goal.

Whenever you add a trait to your character sheet, you can declare that trait a "goal". Add (goal) to the end of the trait. In order to qualify as a goal, there must be a particular circumstance under which that goal could be fulfilled.

Goal traits can be used for augments, but only become the primary trait in a contest when someone is trying to convince the character to abandon, put off, or otherwise deprecate the goal itself.

A character cannot have goals that add up to more than 100 points (20W4) in all, and cannot have more goals than he has keywords. (A beginning character has three keywords - occupation, attunement, and home domain.)

When a goal is fulfilled, you must convert it, point for point, into another trait. "Become King of Jaalban (goal)" might become the relationship trait "King of Jaalban" when it's fulfilled.

When a goal becomes unfulfillable, it can also be converted. If Jaalbanwere to fall into ruin, then "Wants to become King of Jaalban" might become "Wants to avenge the fall of Jaalban"

Thus, goals become banks for points that can be used to buy large traits all at once when they are fulfilled.

Do you see the total limit as a dial? That is, if you had a game with more advanced characters, would you up the limit? The keyword limit suggests that this stuff alters if you have more advanced characters.

In any case, for starting characters, who can't have abilities over 27 anyhow, the limit is going to be by number of keywords to start. It'll take 19 points added to these before anyone will have to worry about the total limit. Is the idea at that point to push players to get goals done so that they can stack up larger, more focused goals (fewer in number)?

Just trying to discern what you were going for with these particular limits.

Mike

I see the total limit (100 points) as a way of balancing the dilettante with the monomaniac.  The more different things you care about, the less you can care about any one of them.  Yes, I don't intend beginning characters to hit this limit immediately.

There's no reason that a player can't start with just one goal.  I expect some people will try to manage lots of smaller goals, building them up and cashing them in quickly, and some will create monomaniacs with one goal that they use for augment after augment, driving their character forward until that track loses interest for them.  The intention is to be flexible with the various directions that players want to take their characters, including conflicting goals, but limit the number enough that only goals which are actually intended to be the focus of play are included.

Cool. I'll come up with some goal abilities for my character tonight!

Mike