I haven't talked about Grey Ranks much, but I feel like I'm getting close to playtesting and will start asking for feedback on bits and pieces.  So:  In GR you play Polish Boy Scouts and Girl Guides during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.  It takes place over nine scenes in three acts, tied to historical events quite closely.  You shoot nazis and fall in love.  No GM, played over three evenings with 2-4 of your friends. 

One thing I'm excited about is the grid (.pdf) that serves as group character sheet and situation generator.

Everybody has a position on the grid, starting out at the exact center.  A character's location on the grid indicates the size of the die they contribute to the collective scene pool, as well as the table from which they draw their situation element and their state of mind.  Success and failure move a character around the grid.  The further from the center you get, the larger your die size and the more insane the situational choices, provided by lists a la In a Wicked Age.  If your character moves into a corner (love that d12) and then beyond it, he's written out of the story.  Mechanically in each scene you're trying to roll over the scene number (1-9) on each of two dice, which have varying sizes.  It starts out easy and becomes nearly impossible.  The only way to succeed late in the game is to give up things that are important to your character in exchange for bonuses.  Things like your faith in God, your family, and your neighborhood.

Each scene is composed of a collective mission in which everybody has a spotlight moment, and a series of vignettes, one per player, which are introspective, emotional, and maybe romantic - probably told in flashback. 

If you succeed in your vignette, you move up on the grid toward love .  If you fail, you move down, toward hate.

If you collectively succeed in your mission, you move left on the grid toward enthusiasm.  Fail, and you all move right, toward exhaustion. 

If you go too far your character is written out of the game through death, insanity, capture, whatever.  This can happen as early as scene five but is far more likely in act three, scenes 7-9.

In the upper left corner = LOVE + ENTHUSIASM = Recklessness, immortality, doomed heroism
In the upper right corner = LOVE + EXHAUSTION = Shell shock, battle fatigue
In the lower left corner = HATE + ENTHUSIASM = Derangement, insanity
In the lower right corner = HATE + EXHAUSTON = Suicidal depression, hopelessness

The grid looks a little complicated but I think it will work very well.  I'm interested in some feedback or initial impressions.  My concerns are these:

1.  Is it odd that there will be situations where failure is a better option, mechancially, than success?  Is that a potential fun-kill?

2.  As I currently envision it, if you on an edge (a d10 space) and succeed or fail in such a way that you would go "beyond" the edge, you instead just move to an adjacent d10 (or corner) spot, based on the other half of the move that you can make.  This is a little inelegant, but I like that it keeps you in the harshest situational territory with big dice. 

3.  Do the pairings of love/hate and enthusiasm/exhaustion make sense?  Do their combinations also make sense?  Are there outcomes that these combinations can't effectively cover?

Thanks for your feedback.

http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/projects/games/grey_ranks/grid_01.pdf

Thats the link without the extraneous ".

I wouldn't change a thing in this, Jason.  Without the actual tables each box is tied to, its hard to say much, but in principle this idea is fantastic, and the axes (love/hate, enthusiasm/exhaustion) are perfect for the theme.

Thanks for fixing my link, Hans, I appreciate it. 

For context, an early draft of the situation generator can be found here. 

Those tables look restrictive to me. I'd just list a level of tension and some examples.

Thanks, Narf, but that's actually the point.  It's an intentional constraint I stole directly from AG&G/In a Wicked Age, and it works wonderfully there.  My hope is that it's the ideal place to inject bits of history and local color that will make the game about a specific time and place.  There's no reason you couldn't create your own situational elements if the spirit moved you, though. 

Jason --

The paired dimensions of Love/Hate and Enthusiasm/Exhaustion make a great deal of sense, with one having to do with the affect (emotional tenor) of a character's experience and the other the power or "amplitude" of that experience:  exhaustion isn't just "very little enthusiasm"; it's a palpable ennui or soul-weariness that drives the character as much as enthusiasm would.  I've recently been reading the French structuralist Algirdas Greimas, and he creates "semiotic squares" that resemble your big grid in form.  One of the important insights that I took away from Greimas is thinking about the interrelationships among the adjacent terms, e.g., Love <--> Exhaustion or Hate <--> Enthusiasm, which you do in thinking about "what do the corners mean."  Another thing that Greimas mentions is the way that, at least in some cases, one set of terms will be "complex" with respect to the other, e.g., it may be possible that Enthusiasm can be read as "Both Love and Hate" while Exhaustion can be read as "Neither Love nor Hate."  Which is interesting, in that it suggests that someone with high Enthusiasm is tapping into a whole set of passions and engagements with others, while someone with high Exhaustion is highly self-absorbed, self-considering, alienated, and so forth.  In other words, Enthusiasm reinforces the emotional or affective dimension (thereby creating opportunities to go out in a blaze of glory, as it were) while Exhaustion creates paradoxical self-contradictory and thereby self-destructive impulses in combination with emotional imperatives.

So I think it's neat stuff, here.

Thanks, Bill, that's a little astonishing, actually. 

How do you feel about the existing possibility of drifting back into the d4 territory - ineffectual, pretty much guaranteed to fail in later scenes, in the center of the grid?  I'm not sure about what that means, if you attribute relevancy to the movement toward the edges and corners.  Returning to where you started, equidistant from the extremes, seems incongruous in the context of the Uprising, but is a mechanical possibility right now. 

I suspect it's a mechanical possibility that will not be pursued by the players since it's mechanically disincentivized.

Yeah, but you don't always get to decide if you win or lose.  A couple of savagely unfortunate scenes, and it could just happen.

I need to sit down with a million monkeys and roll some dice, just to see how it tends to resolve.  There are a lot of variables.

Love the grid.

As for being yanked back to the middle...sounds like your version of a death spiral.  You lose a couple mid game conflicts wind up back in the middle with low dice going into the harder scenes where the high difficulty and low dice drive you towards the Hate and Exhaustion corner pretty remorselessly.  This sounds completely appropriate given the source material.

As long as your ability to sacrifice gives you the chance to win, even when your base dice are low, I don't think that will be a problem.  You'll just be forced to make the decision to sacrifice in Mid Game instead of End Game...which seems like a reasonable choice and reasonable price to pay for failure.

Perhaps you can tie the sacrifice mechanics to the grid position as well so that a sacrifice is worth more either a) when you have a low die, or b) when you're closer to the Hate/Exhaustion corner depending on which makes more sense.

Emotional exhaustion can certainly come with hate; it's just not a very enthusiastic hate. More along the lines of sitting in a corner and glaring rather than taking action.

Jason wrote:
Yeah, but you don't always get to decide if you win or lose.  A couple of savagely unfortunate scenes, and it could just happen.

I need to sit down with a million monkeys and roll some dice, just to see how it tends to resolve.  There are a lot of variables.

Jason wrote:
Thanks, Bill, that's a little astonishing, actually.

How do you feel about the existing possibility of drifting back into the d4 territory - ineffectual, pretty much guaranteed to fail in later scenes, in the center of the grid?  I'm not sure about what that means, if you attribute relevancy to the movement toward the edges and corners.  Returning to where you started, equidistant from the extremes, seems incongruous in the context of the Uprising, but is a mechanical possibility right now. 

Thanks for all the feedback.  I'll revise and chew on this stuff over the weekend.  One change - I'll tip the grid 45 degrees, so that you just go up, right, down or left based on your paired success or failure.  Much easier to grasp. 

Ralph:  Thanks for the die size suggestion.  As it sits the die size is fixed and scales - the there are five things held dear.  The first  brought into play (and thus prepared for destruction) gets a weak die and the last gets a fat die.  When destroyed, these are inverted, so the last thing the group clings to is worth the most when wrecked.  But that's only one way to do it.  Must consider.

Hans:  I did consider that, but I like the idea of malleable dice - losing effectiveness makes you unpopular, and the social dynamic at the table is really important, because you will be incentivized to screw other players in every scene.  Plus it is another data point to keep track of. 

Narf:  I imagine someone sitting at one of the d10's between the suicidal drepression corner and the nervous breakdown corner could definitely be in that head-space.  The situations will hopefully offer options to support that.

Bill:  Astonished as in "I would not have thought to look there for inspiration or validation!"  But strictly awesome; I'll take a look and maybe it'll end up in the bibliography if you can provide a citation...

Rock and roll, guys.  I totally appreciate your thoughts. 

One more thing, Bill - I'm considering a "MVP/weakest link" mechanism after each scene, prior to movement, as discussed in the sister thread over at Story-Games.  The MVP would get to choose where they went, and staying where they are would be an option.  The Weak link - not so sure.  Maybe a blind vote by all the players as to which direction they go?  Maybe they move two in the indicated direction?  I'd like to tie it to movement rather than some other sub-system, both for elegance and because if you are the weak link, you are probably already failing mechanically. 

In any case, the MVP would enjoy the luxury of standing still on the grid if he chose.

I just posted some marginally coherent notes over at Fair Play - I'll return with a new post once I polish them.

Heya,

One thing I really like about your game, Jason, is that it has a graphic organizer- the Grid in your case.  I wish more games would start using them.  Maps and character sheets have been around a long time, but I think we can start innovating beyond those.  I think your Grid really gives your game a leg up and I applaud you for including it in your design.  It's something that should really catch on.

Peace,

-Troy

I've revised the grid a little, here.

It’s smaller and simpler. If you visit any corner twice, your character is written out of the story. So you can flirt with suicidal depression and earn a d12, but if you wind up in that corner a second time, it’s curtains. It’s possible to do that as early as scene seven (out of nine). The central square is now a miserable d2, and begs to be avoided. I’m hoping a bit of tactical gameplay will emerge as players try to avoid certain outcomes that would drive their characters into dangerous territory. Let me know what you think.

I don't know if this is intentional, but the game seems to lack a reward for winning.
Not a problem for everyone, of course.

Hey, Jason --

This system strongly rewards momentum.  If, to start, you win, you want to keep winning.  If you lose, you want to keep losing.  If you have a complicated win/loss pair, you want to keep having the same pair.

Is that what you want for the game?

yrs--
--Ben

Narf:  You can't win, that's a central point.  You are going to get kicked in the nuts.  You can guide the process, you can do it with passion, style and elan, you can save the things that are important to your soul and sanity, but at the end of scene nine Warsaw is flattened and you are either dead or a POW or worse.

Ben:  I think it is, but playtesting will tell. 

I really want the die pool to be a contentious resource, and I do worry that disparate "corner" goals may take the drama out of that.  The guy angling to constantly fail and the guy angling to constantly succeed are not really at odds. I'm still mulling over group penalties and rewards based on mission success or failure - right now they are weak.

I want the thematic corners to be attractive and important, and the center to be avoided.  I want this to reinforce a natural story progression when coupled with situation elements.