I got into the issues of the previous design thread ('Must learn crane technique') and the problem point really, really surprised me. Which is a good thing. I'm going to post the PM's here, because the issue isn't clear cut yet and I don't trust myself to summerise Brother Bloods points.

Brother Blood wrote:

Callan wrote:
Okay, this is definately the sticking point. Where getting somewhere with this! Good.

It's just colour? Is that because it's all up to 'the GM's whim'?

Say you were at the top of a small cliff with a boulder in front of you and an evil enemy orc directly below. If you say you push the boulder over the edge, is it just the GM's whim when he says it lands on the orc? It was just his whim that it happened that way?

I'm pretty sure it is the GM's choice that it works that way. But as a player I'm pretty sure I can guess his choice - it'll fall withing a narrow range of choices. The reason it'll be inside a narrow range of choices, is that he'll be restricting himself to how a game world works.

Can you see how the GM only lets himself choose from a narrow range of results? Which means you can have an effect on the game world, more than colour, because his narrow range matches pretty well with what you expect in the real world?

If he doesn't restrict himself, I'll give up on playing with him. The game he runs is too hard for me, when you push a boulder and it falls at an angle to the earth, missing the orc (when all other rocks fall straight down), that's so bizarre its just too hard a game to play (it's too hard to plan in advance with that bizarro game world going on).

I'm pretty sure you must have GM'ed at some point in time. If I pushed a rock off the edge of a cliff in one of your games, how likely is it that you'd say 'it falls to earth at an angle!'? Seriously, give me some actual play accounts where you've made calls this crazy? You sound like a level headed, intelligent guy. Which makes that rock pretty predictable, in that it'll fall straight down.

For "GM's whim" I really mean a whim, not a judgement based on the description of the game world and the situation. What you wrote in this MP is the description of a rather traditional "GM's Fiat" system, like in a so-called "ruleless" gpg or in a game like Amber. A system in which the outcome of an action is still decided with karma, drama (and sometimes fortune) but all the "weighting" of these factors is delegated to the master. I played in similer games (I cited Amber in one of my MPs). But this is NOT what I understood from you post in the forge.  What I "read" in your posts was the description of a GM who would decide REALLY on a pure whim. as a "game feature".

I am not an English native speaker, so maybe I misunderstood the meaning of your words, but from the reactions of the other persons who answered you, I think I wasn't the only one that believed you talked about this.

Brother Blood wrote:

Callan wrote:
I'll say this, for this design, the judgement the GM makes - it isn't open to debate by players. Players aren't to judge how well the GM made judgement based on the description of the game world and the situation. They don't have to do that anymore.

Does it become GM whim, in your mind, if the players can't judge how well the GM is making his judgements about the game world?

Mmmm...  I don't think this is even possible.

In a classic "GM's fiat" game, the GM is the final arbiter of any resolution. He can be restrained by a resolution system that lets him decide only a number (i.e., Ars Magica, where the GM decide the difficulty of an action, and I saw many GM decide that number only AFTER the rolls) or he can be absolutely free of written mechanics (the classic "ruleless game"), but in the end he is the one who decide "what happens", and the players know this.

So, I think it's impossible for the players to see that decision as something so impersonal to be out of their judgement. Every player always is judging the GM, giving him appraise and cheers or instead showing boredom, contraryness or even stop playing. This is what Agenda is all about, no? If there wasn't any feedback why the GM should play?

If the player in an Ars Magica game try do do something really easy, roll seven "1" and do the ubercritical roll of his life, a roll that would be enough to kill Smaug with a blunt dart, and the GM says "you failed" without any reason given to the players, I think that it' impossible for the player to not judge him.

The rules of the game could tell this (hell, the rules of A LOT of games ALREADY tell this), but it's rubbish.  The GM is always judged by the players.

Even if you write in the rules that the players can't TALK about it (and it would be a rule that would make it much worse), they would show their opinion anyway (they could sleep on the couch instead of listenung, for example).

And no game rules can take from the players the ultimate power of judgment: they can always walk away.

The GM know this, too, so (if he don't want people to walk away) his decison is never really "free".

Callan wrote: If you read my post as originally saying the GM makes his call and the players aren't empowered to say a damn thing, then yeah, you read it right.

I think you just are trying to codify in rules a new "impossibile thing before breakfast"

At first, I reacted to your game because I found the description enterely "not fun" and "not gamist". Now that you explained it better, I see that it could be maybe fun and gamist, but only if the players and the GM will ignore (how they ALWAYS do in all the games that already have written in the rules such nonsense, so it should not be a big problem) all what you say about talking and judging.

Callen,

The latest version of the game fixes the problems of the original Rocks Falling game.

In the original, there was no reason to bid anything.

In this version there is a reason to bid.  If you win, well, you win.  If you loose, you become more effective at the cost of game currency.  The more you bid, the more you progress and the more currency you loose.  When you reach a certain point (20 of them), you have will be able to always win a specific percentage of fights.  The more often you hit that threshold, the higher the percentage of fights you will always win.

I believe that the people in your thread were seeing two problems, both of which you can easily solve without sacrificing anything of importance.

The first is the choices for when your move fails.  If a player fails, C is the best strategy and will almost always be taken.  You can deal with this a couple of ways.

First, you can ignore it.  Its not that big a problem.  Solutions A and B do not detract from the game.  Solution C is all about humility.  And martial arts is (theoretically) all about humility.  Treat it as flavor and move on.

Second, you could balance them.  Perhaps there are three pay-offs and the GM secretly orders them.  Or perhaps you keep the payoffs as is, but the GM secretly chooses 1 which will not give any payoff.

The third would involve limiting the number of total techniques a player has access to.  Once he gives up on one, that one can never be the counter to that specific move.  Thus there is a reason not to always take option C.

The other problem is easily solved.  As written (in the less then 1 page description) the actual benefit of your 20pt counter technique is easily minimised.  With a non-finite number of potential moves, each enemy could use a different move always.  Thus after 20 points worth of defeats, you will only succeed once.

This could easily be solved by limiting the number techniques, both the total number of techniques available to NPCs (and possibly players) and the number of technique each NPC can have.

You could also solve it by letting the attacked PC choose their opponents technique.

A third way would be to make it so instead of your move being the ultimate counter, it made you more powerful.  Say NPCs came in 3 levels.  Once you hit 20 points, you could always win against level 1 opponents.  When you hit 40 you could always defeat level 2s and at 60 you could always defeat level 3s.

In the current version, you have defined the number of points needed to advance, but not the amount of currency they have to spend on it.  This could lead to potential problems, such as a player always bidding 20 so they always win and loose nothing.  But simply fleshing out the rules should fix issues like that.

This version is a vast improvement over the last.  The original game had a core deficit.  This game does not.  Its still far from perfect, but that's not supprising considering its less then a page long at this point.  I am honestly supprised that you did not get more positive feedback.

One last, minor point.  I think it would be fun if you found a way to put back the "guess the gm" bit from the original.  You managed to create a fair coordination game, which is very rare in RPGs.

Best,
        Bill

Ah, that was a good reply, thanks Bill. :)

In this version there is a reason to bid.  If you win, well, you win.  If you loose, you become more effective at the cost of game currency.  The more you bid, the more you progress and the more currency you loose.  When you reach a certain point (20 of them), you have will be able to always win a specific percentage of fights.  The more often you hit that threshold, the higher the percentage of fights you will always win.

The first is the choices for when your move fails.  If a player fails, C is the best strategy and will almost always be taken.  You can deal with this a couple of ways.

The third would involve limiting the number of total techniques a player has access to.  Once he gives up on one, that one can never be the counter to that specific move.  Thus there is a reason not to always take option C.

The other problem is easily solved.  As written (in the less then 1 page description) the actual benefit of your 20pt counter technique is easily minimised.  With a non-finite number of potential moves, each enemy could use a different move always.  Thus after 20 points worth of defeats, you will only succeed once.

One last, minor point.  I think it would be fun if you found a way to put back the "guess the gm" bit from the original.  You managed to create a fair coordination game, which is very rare in RPGs.

Do you mean something analogous to the following:
I entered Dungeon X to pick on goblins and level up in my style (sneaker, tank, magician).  Unfortunately it was full of Umber Hulks and I had to flee, but I nevertheless bagged enough loot to level up.  Thus, it doesn't matter that I had to flee, or why, particularly.

Callen,

I'm not sure what you mean by 'cost of game currency'.

What's at stake isn't your characters whole life, just a slab of his HP.

"Damn, it took me until I gained 15 XP to find the right move. It took Jim only 5! And Tom got it on the first try!! Gah, I gotta get better at this!".

You have XP counters for each type of move you've experienced against you. Say its from zero to twenty. When you get to twenty, whatever move you used when you reached twenty, becomes the right move to make against that opponents move (forever onward!).

I'm going to be a bit disappointing, because I'm not sure what you mean by 'Guess the GM' bit, because I think guessing the GM is in this design (so I must be thinking of something different to you). Could you elaborate?

Oh, I'm terrible. I forgot I had put HP on the line in the previous thread. The HP risk is kind of like the scoring system I suggested above - a way of guaging how well/terrible your doing. It's not a trade for growth.

I thought that you had to gain 20 XP before you got the ability.  In your Must Learn Crane... thread you said,

You have XP counters for each type of move you've experienced against you. Say its from zero to twenty. When you get to twenty, whatever move you used when you reached twenty, becomes the right move to make against that opponents move (forever onward!).

I was also under the impression, from reading your Must Learn Crane... thread that you simply accumulated XP until you hit 20, then whatever move you happen to be fighting is the one you now know.  This does not seem to be the case.  As a result, my second issue is a lot less of an issue.

You then go on to describe your move. The GM/other player then has absolute fiat to decide if that works out.

However, I think that it would still be cool if there were only a finite number of Styles out there and you had some cool system for players to build them.  When all styles have a counter you move into some form of end game where the PCs resolve the original conflict.  When end game resolves you give the PCs a permanent max HP bonus and add another pile of Styles to the list.  Then start the whole thing over again.

I personally think that a similar system would be cool.  Instead of Health, Stamina and Horse Back Riding you could use Strength, Speed and Chi.  You bid any number of resources from these pools.  The GM chooses 1 pool which will be penalized.  If the pool penalized was one which you bid nothing from then you win.  If you have at least 1 pool penalized, you loose the resources that you bid from that pool and gain XP equal to the resources that you lost.