Pool-aris.

I often leave the Forge for a few weeks at a time, while I'm off thinking about games, come up with what I think is a good idea, and go excitedly to the First Thoughts forum, only to discover that someone else has come up with something strikingly similar, a few days before me. That's happened again with this thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=27523.0, on an Arthurian GM-less RPG. Lots of similar ideas, and a very similar theme, to the ones I've had running around in my head these last few weeks, though I hope my idea is different enough to warrant a separate thread.

The idea I've been working on is a system for an Arthurian setting - although I hope it may be flexible enough to work in lots of other settings as well. It's inspired principally by reviews I've read of Polaris, which fired off my imagination about narrated resolution, although I've held off purchasing that game (for now!) until I've got my thoughts a bit more organised so that I don't just end up trying to directly copy it.

The players all take on the roles of storytellers sitting around a campfire - or perhaps aboard a boat on a long sea-crossing, or sitting around the hearth of a tavern, late in the night - and they are recounting a story they all remember about the heroes of their youth - the Arthurian knights and the legends about their heroic quests. They all remember things slightly differently, however. They do all agree on the final outcome of the quest - the brave knights slew the evil sorceror, or rescued the maiden, or killed the dragon - but they don't agree on the details. Play takes the form of a series of scenes in which the players tell the story, argue over the details using the negotiation system, before finally reaching the resolution.

The key element of the system is the negotiation mechanism. Essentially a player starts a scene describing how a character in the story overcame a particular incident or hazard. He can narrate anything he likes consistent with the game world, until the GM - or a player assigned to be the 'opposition' in this particular scene -  challenges an element of the narration. If they win the challenge then they take over the narration and steer it in a different direction unless and until the first player wrests it back again.

How does this work? Imagine Albert and Bob are playing a scene. Albert starts narrating how the Black Knight rode into the forest and killed the dragon. At some point Albert will describe something that Bob doesn't want to happen:

"The Black Knight drew his sword and thrust it through the dragon's heart."

When that happens Bob can challenge the narration using a key phrase:

"Your memory plays you false"

and stumping up one die from his die pool, which he lays on the table as his stake. Bob then presents an alternative narration:

"The Black Knight drew his sword, but the dragon opened its mouth and blasted the sword with a jet of flame, rendering it too hot to hold."

Albert can accept this alternative narration, and pass narrative rights over to Bob to continue the story, or he can challenge back to retain control, laying one of his own dice pool as a counterstake and saying:

"I remember it clearly"

Bob then has to decide whether to accept this, or to further escalate by laying additional dice, as does Albert. Bob or Albert can yield at any point, in which case everyone takes their dice back, and the winner continues the narration. However if noone backs down after a certain point then it becomes a simple roll-off. Both sides roll all the dice they have staked, and the highest total score wins. The winner takes the loser's dice, and continues the narration.

There is a bit more to it than that - both Albert and Bob have 'twists' they can cash in for additional dice when escalating, in order to push the story in a particular direction and to improve their odds in a roll-off. The basic resolution of the heroic quest is already agreed at the beginning, but what it costs the heroes to achieve that is what the story-telling process reveals. I envisage the scenes working in a very structured way, with each player in turn overcoming a 'hazard' until enough hazards have been defeated for everyone to move to the end of the quest, where the quest maguffin is rescued or killed or captured or whatever.

What I want to achieve with this negotiation system - and with having the players as story-tellers within the gameworld - is a sense of immersion, where negotiations about stakes and outcomes forms part of the immersive experience, rather than bringing the players out of the game. The metagame should be part of, not separate from, the world the PCs inhabit.

So, questions:
- Do you think that this could achieve that immersive experience I'm aiming for?
- Is it enough simply to have the players inhabit the roles of storytellers, without there being any particular reward mechanic for them in that role? The heroes go on the quest, the storytellers remain unchanged (unlike, for example, the storytellers in 1001 Nights). Can that work?
- I'm not sure whether this game needs a single GM, or whether it could work with players taking it in turns to GM each other's scenes?
- Is the dice-off too simple, and too easily gamed?

Michael.

Nice idea, I know a number of groups who'd enjoy a system like this.

My only queries regards the core resolution method...

MikeF wrote:
Bob then has to decide whether to accept this, or to further escalate by laying additional dice, as does Albert. Bob or Albert can yield at any point, in which case everyone takes their dice back, and the winner continues the narration. However if no-one backs down after a certain point then it becomes a simple roll-off. Both sides roll all the dice they have staked, and the highest total score wins. The winner takes the loser's dice, and continues the narration.

Vulpinoid,

Thanks very much for the feedback. I think you're right to pick up on the spiral-of-death aspect of the loser handing over all his dice to the winner. I'm in two minds whether this is as big a problem as you suspect - I called this thread Pool-aris because I was also thinking about how dice gambling works in The Pool, and my understanding from various play reviews is that large dice pools don't result in the kind of unbalanced winners-streak that you're talking about. Of course The Pool uses unopposed rolls, and doesn't work on totalling up the scores, so I accept that it is a very different system.

I'm currently intending that the game would work with each player in turn taking a scene, in which the story-character that they 'champion' (their PC's PC, if you will) overcomes a hazard on the way to the ultimate quest resolution. One other player takes the role of the GM for that scene, providing the opposition to that character's progression. With that sort of structure one possible solution to the winners-streak problem is that any exchange of dice happens only for the duration of the scene itself. That way, neither the player nor the GM is likely to get so many dice over the course of the individual scene as to throw the story out of whack. At the end of the scene everyone could get their dice back, and play moves to the next player.

I do like your tokens idea, and I've mulled something similar, but I don't want to run with it for two reasons : one is that I want the mechanics to be as simple as possible, and even something as straightforward as having to manage both tokens and dice, and translate one into the other I think is an unnecessary complication. The other is that I'm aesthetically opposed to non-standard dice, and I want the game to run with d6 as far as possible.

A particular problem with totalling up scores is that at certain ratios of dice one player can be guaranteed to win. An alternative dice mechanism did occur, which is for players to roll and then compare highest individual scores. If there is a draw for highest dice then the player with more dice showing that number wins. If there's still a draw move to the next highest number.
e.g. Player A rolls 6,6,4
Player B rolls 6,5,5,3,1,1
So Player A wins because he has more 6s.

As I was typing out my last post, I did think of the complications between counters and dice, and working out sides compared to counters spent, and...etc.

But I was on a roll and didn't want to stop typing halfway through for fear of confusing you (and myself...)

The system I proposed would work just as easily if the challenger put forward a number of d6s (rather than spending tokens and calculating a die type to roll), especially if using your method of high-die wins, ties compare the next highest die.

For example:

Challenger offers three dice to claim narrative control. Current narrator counters with four dice. The winner claims narration rights, the loser and everyone else in the group reclaim a single d6 to their pools.

It keeps the account keeping at a minimum and only uses "newcomer-friendly" d6s.

My follow up query would be...

How would you resolve a three way struggle for narrative control?

Or do you simply limit the challenges to "one person at a time". With the follow-up rule that attempts to wrest narrative control may only occur after the current narrator has had the chance to complete a full sentence or scene?

V

 

I'm a big fan of the "highest dice, discard ties" system for dice rolling. I can't work out the probs for it, but it means that when someone has 4 6s to someone else's 3 6s, they win. It's really unlikely to have ties all the way down, and it works for more than one person, because the top dice chop out on a one for one basis. Actually, ties are more common the more people, naturally, so you could say that the person who wins ties is the original player, or he already went out the person who has least dice left (just to help out the unlucky). Then you could have it that people keep the dice that they won with, as you have discarded all the higher ones, and the losers loose all of there's.

You could find the average dice loss through play, and give that to each person periodically, but that doesn't create the auto-balancer that the pool has in the "monologue" perhaps you could choose between getting your dice and a small deviation, and taking over narration? That way who owned what character would always be in doubt, and people would have to try to win the knight back when the new narrator next says something wrong.

I've played with several very similar systems, and found this sort of thing to work best:

1. Anti-Pool instead of Pool

All players involved in a struggle for dominance roll. Winner loses all dice rolled but wins narration. Losers retain their dice and gain one more die to add to their current total.

This works really well. However, there is a temptation for people to challenge others a lot with just one die, hoping to lose. It usually works fune because it's not a HUGE temptation: if the other person is willing to give up, or loses the roll, the challenger loses that one die.

However, in certain situations, that could be a problem--depends on how the rest of your system works.

2. A closed system solution

One way this could work really nicely (and easy to handle) is to have the number of dice in play fixed.

So, in a contest, you and I both roll however many dice we want. The winner takes over narration. The loser shuts up but simply reaches over and takes all the dice the winner just rolled.

This is my preferred method for this kind of thing.

As for the specifics of what you're discussing:

The nice thing about using Anti-Pool instead of the regular Pool method is that the dice effectively measure out "spotlight" or "narration" time. When you narrate, you tend to lose dice. When you sit and listen, you tend to accumulate dice.

Finally, the "highest result"-type system (for odds, do a search for "Sorcerer dice") is a much better choice for this than "compare dice totals". It's faster AND less predictable, both good things for the system you're describing,

My experience has also been that you really need some other goal or direction for play to make this sort of game work. It's OK as you've described, but with a goal or a mechanic that gives players a clearer idea about where to push the story or "how to win", things get clearer and better.

I hope some of that helps!